At Project Computing we have developed a simple but effective client side dynamic HTML Typing Tutor page for gaining and consolidating typing skills.

Just click http://projectcomputing.com/resources/touchtype.html to have the full Typing Tutor come up in your browser immediately.

The Typing Tutor uses CSS and JavaScript all in one standard HTML 4.0 page. It is server independent, needing no ActiveX, Java or other components. It contains no pop-ups or advertising, and its only link simply refers back to this page.

The Typing Tutor is designed for "modern" browsers and we have tested it on MSIE 6.0 and Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7.

If you wish, you can download the Typing Tutor to your own PC and use it from there. The most likely reason you would want to do this is to change the JavaScript setup() function near the top of the page to add more training prompts to the array named garray or perhaps you may like to modify CSS or even play with the keystroke event handling code. If you have a local web server you can copy the page into your web directory. If you don't have a local web server and are running Windows, just copy it to some place on your file system and double click it for Windows Explorer to render it using Internet Explorer. If you do this, depending on your version of windows and security settings, you may have to enable scripting on this file.

You may modify the Typing Tutor sample code and place the modified page on a public web server, but please include an attribution notice with a link back to this page, and contact us via email to tell us about your derived version.

The sample page is free and consequently we provide neither support nor guarantees. Use at your own risk.

The Touch Typing Tutor page was written by John Evershed, Project Computing.

Get in a comfortable and safe position, as described by many web resource pages. (Feet flat on the floor, elbows at approximately 90 degrees, no significant bending of the wrist, monitor at an appropriate height, back relaxed etc). Place your index fingers over the 'F' and 'J' keys on the "home" row of the keyboard. The index fingers are the busy ones as they control the keys above and below the home keys ('R' and 'V' on the left, 'U' and 'M' on the right) as well as the 'T', 'G', 'B' for the left and 'Y', 'H', 'N' on the right. The other fingers each control 3 keys, the thumbs use the space bar and the little fingers also use the shift key if needed.

With caps lock off and num lock on and the page having the focus in your browser, try to type the letter which is underlined in the prompt (without looking at the keyboard). Success will advance the underlining to the next letter and highlight the successful keystroke, whereas failure will not affect the prompt, but you will receive a visual warning on the keyboard image below the prompt as immediate feedback. In the early stages of learning the letter positions you will need to look at the keyboard image but soon you will be able to ignore it.

When you finish a line, the next line will replace it immediately. If you want to skip a line or repeat the line there are buttons for that purpose. (pressing the enter key will skip the current line as well).

The typing statistics (count, speed, accuracy) will be updated as you go. Note that if you delay between keys for longer than 5 seconds the clock will be temporarily stopped. There is a button available to clear the statistics at any time.

The exercises do not much use the shift key (little finger) nor the numeric keys. If you need to use numerics you can use the numbers on the main keyboard or (if num lock is on) the numeric keypad. Numerics and some special keys are not shown on the visual keyboard image to keep it uncluttered, but there is indication of which key you pressed below the image.

Note that keys like backspace (which usually take you to the previous page in the browser) are disabled for the Typing Tutor page only, so that you are not surprised by keying errors.

Just click http://projectcomputing.com/resources/touchtype.html to have the full Typing Tutor come up in your browser immediately.