Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?

Re:Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I... by 1337shadow on Monday April 20, 2020 @07:08AM (#22922826)

Indeed it's just my personal experience, but there's a fact that you seem to have missed: the distance that fingers must walk to type the same text is higher in qwerty than in dvorak, that's the whole point of dvorak and others such as bepo. So, typing in Qwerty is more physical work than typing Dvorak. There are ways to calculate that pretty accurately.

I don't have proof that less finger distance means less hand work means less pain, so maybe you're right, maybe it's just a coincidence.

Or maybe less finger distance means less work which means less tension accumulated in the muscles and then indeed less pain.

Nonetheless, I changed "fixed my RSI" by "fixed my RSI problems" thanks to your feedback, which should clear out the misunderstanding.

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Re:Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I... by kqr on Monday April 20, 2020 @10:40AM (#22924172)

It's also worth mentioning that some of the Qwerty pain can be psychosomatic in origin. Even for me, who hasn't suffered RSI, it was pretty clear that I didn't feel the exertion of Qwerty until I had gotten used to something better (Colemak, in my case.) Once I knew how nice it can feel to type on a keyboard, anything less nice starts mentally hurting – and I'm sure, for some people, also physically.

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