How do I help my mum’s typing?

QMy mother is in her eighties and has a Chromebook for accessing the internet. Her hand control has deteriorated so, when typing, she often accidentally enters a character multiple times. This is particularly frustrating when she’s entering passwords, as the characters are not displayed on screen. More than once this has led to her being locked out of online accounts for repeatedly entering the wrong password. Is it possible to make any changes so that one key press enters a single character only. If this is not an option on a Chromebook, would it be possible on a Windows laptop? Richard Salisbury

AYour mum’s Chromebook does have an option that will help.

First, click her user icon at the bottom right or, in the browser, click the menu button (three horizontal lines, top right). Next, in the Device section, click the ‘Keyboard settings’ button. From here you can either clear the tick from the ‘Enable auto-repeat’ box (see screenshot left) to prevent all repeated inputs, or move the ‘Delay before repeating’ slider towards Long.

There’s a similar option in Windows. First, click Start followed by the Settings cog, and then ‘Ease of Access’ followed by Keyboard. Now switch Filter Keys to the On position, scroll down, flip Enable Repeat Keys to On and then use the two dropdown menus below to choose the delay allowed between the first and subsequent repeated keystrokes (see screenshot above).