My RSI Story
I began suffering from RSI when I was 22 years old. The symptoms started during my final year project at university. I was doing a computer science degree and had been working long hours when I began to suffer with pains in my arms. Initially I dismissed them but within only a couple of weeks it was impossible to ignore them anymore. My work became difficult and I was faced with the prospect of trying to finish a programming project and write a dissertation without being able to use my hands. I was fortunate that I was working for a good company at the same time as going to university. My manager at work was very helpful. She put me on light duties for which I would not have to use my hands and found another student to help me code my project.
It was around this time I was introduced to speech recognition. I had a disability assessment performed by Ability Net. They looked at my workspace, made some recommendations for a special mouse and keyboard and generally adjusted things. They also provided me with speech recognition software. Using this, I was able to finish my dissertation and most of the programming side of my project with the help of friends/colleagues. When I managed to finish my degree I was incredibly relieved but realised that if I was to continue woring as a programmer I would have to find some means of doing my work.
I started surfing the Internet to see if anybody else was in the same predicament as me. I found that others have been solving this problem for some time and there were some tools on the Internet already written by fellow sufferers to solve some of the problems I was experiencing. It took me some time to sift through the available tools and work out what was appropriate for me and what would work with the latest speech recognition software. After I had a basic system sorted out, I learned how to use the macro language which came with my speech recognition software to adapt speech to my own needs. This is a long process and I discovered that I had to look long and hard at my priorities in life. Learning to use speech to do my job took many months (and caused me quite a lot of pain in my arms initially) and I thought long and hard thing about whether it would be easier to change career. However, my company was understanding and I spent several months investigating and developing my own solutions to my problems. Initially I gave the company almost nothing in return but eventually I got more and more efficient until now I believe I am just as valuable an employee as I ever was. It took a long time to accept my disability and learn to work around it but, ironically, when I had, my symptoms started to improve. I now find that I can type for some of my tasks and use speech recognition for others.