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Comment by dmd | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people - especially people with impairments whom it would help a lot if they know about it - are unaware of the fantastic pointer-accessibility stuff that's built into MacOS:

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/move-the-pointer-us...

You can control the pointer with head movements, and click with things like blinks and smiles. All built into the OS, no 3rd party software.

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I've been looking for settings like this on my iPhone -- I'm probably in the minority here but I'd love to be able to do a couple of simple gesture-based commands on my phone. E.g. when I'm driving and my phone is mounted just slightly out of reach, and I no longer need my screen on and displaying Maps, it would be great if I could do some kind of hand wave to lock the screen. Sure I could mount my phone closer, or just lean over a bit and hit the button, or probably even ask Siri to do it... but dammit a [Jedi | Minority Report | Tony Stark ] hand-wave would be much cooler :) Pixel phones have some similar abilities: https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/9517454

If quick gestures aren’t working: Turn off your phone, then turn it back on.

Some tricks never die.

That was only available on the Pixel 4. They got rid of the chip in later phones, due to battery life issues and cost:

https://www.androidpolice.com/google-pixel-4-killed-motion-s...

Heat pointer is great and I really hope Apple follows it up with building proper eye tracking hardware and software into Macs & iDevices. It's such a great opportunity to improve UX and reduce RSI for everyone by sharing the load among more input sources. I've tried the Tobii stuff but it's not great, no solution out there has quite nailed the calibration nor the UX yet, as it requires OS-level UX changes.

Every input source has a point after which it causes fatigue or pain - hands, head, eyes, tongue, feet, etc. The more the load is spread out, the better! This MouthPad looks fantastic as another input method to share the load.

A feature nobody knows about which I loved back when using Windows was the cursor defaulting to the confirmation button in dialogs. Nowadays where everything is web it's less useful I suppose, but makes clicking through those dialogs nicely faster also as someone who doesn't have a mouse-related impairment!

> Nowadays where everything is web it's less useful I suppose

Implementation of cursor defaulting to the declination button in web is waiting for its hero. Also I need to iterate between the all possible Nos on a webpage by pressing Tab/Shift+Tab key on my keyboard since no one uses this key on a web-browser any more.

I feel like there's a lot of room for accidents here, though. If you aren't expecting a dialog to come up, but are using the mouse, you might accidentally click to accept something you didn't want to do.

And I'm glad web pages can't make use of this; that's just ripe for abuse. Though I suppose what might be acceptable would be a more limited protocol where a webpage is allowed to ask the web browser to move the pointer to a particular non-hidden UI element, and only in response to some sort of user interaction. Still, this sort of thing seems concerning.

Definitely. It has been a decade and my memory isn't perfect, but I think this was about as rare as focus sealers today, like where you get a pop up just as you were tapping somewhere else and thus either dismiss it or push a button that you didn't intend. The first example that comes to mind is Spotify pushing something like a year overview 0.2 seconds after the app opens when your finger was just coming down on the "my library" button and so you dismiss it and there's no way to open it again. Pretty sure this happens to me 2 out of 3 years.

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