It occurs to me that blind people who are proficient at writing braille would likely be able to learn steno with relative ease, because they're already used to

It occurs to me that blind people who are proficient at writing braille would likely be able to learn steno with relative ease, because they're already used to routinely pressing several keys in one stroke (up to 8 at a time in 8-dot computer braille). Also, braille has several contractions, including dot combinations that don't map to single letters but to common two-letter sequences like 'th' and 'st'. Steno, being syllabic, requires fewer keystrokes per word than braille, but at least proficient braille users would already have the dexterity and some of the concepts. Edit: On a more software-related topic, the interaction between Plover and a screen reader (assistive technology used by blind people) would be... interesting, particularly if the user is using text-to-speech output rather than a braille display. Plover simulates individual QWERTY keystrokes, and a screen reader often speaks in response to keystrokes. So to take the example of entering "Python", the screen reader would notice the backspaces produced by the second steno keystroke and would try to speak the backspaced characters, interrupting itself all along the way, before speaking the newly constructed word (assuming the user has word echo enabled). The response to the asterisk key would also be suboptimal. I don't know how best to solve that. On Windows, the best solution would probably be an add-on module for the open-source NVDA screen reader (http://www.nvaccess.org/ http://www.nvaccess.org/), which is in Python. Edit 2: I belatedly remembered the correct answer to the above problem for Windows. On Windows, Plover should be using the Text Services Framework as an alternative to simulating keystrokes, where the TSF is available, which includes Microsoft Word and standard edit controls. I guess I should implement that.