What are you doing with your hands?

So now I am really curious, because this keeps coming up periodically. It came up again in a recent thread about using the Mac.

What are you people doing with your hands?

If I'm at a keyboard, my hands are on the home row, ready to type, unless I'm doing something else that's not on the keyboard, like getting a drink. But people keep lamenting the fact that you need two hands to use Voiceover, like it's some sort of obvious defect. I think I've probably done *something* or other on Windows with one hand, but nothing that particularly stands out.

One-handed typing jokes of old aside, seriously, what's going on? Assume you're in your single-handed happy place. You're doing all you can do on a keyboard to control things with one hand, go nuts, one finger even! What's your other hand doing that's so important? I don't get it. Clearly other folks are using their keyboard in a different way than I am.

But I mean, if I'm doing any kind of typing, two hands. Most audio games on Windows? Two hands, because you're usually using arrows and some other key, ctrl, space, and so on. The one thing I can readily think of where one-handed stuff comes up a fair bit is media playback, but even there, you're not getting it unless you remap keys a lot of the time.

I mean, I'm not saying it never comes up or anything. I'm just trying to think of like, basic screen reader controls, e.g. NVDA, and again, you're at least doing multiple keys, if not both hands all of the time, e.g. NVDA-down for say all which would be two hands if you don't have, or aren't using, a numpad with the insert key.

So please, enlighten me. What am I missing here? Because both hands on the keyboard feels super normal to me, and not like I'm living in a super intense eighties hacker movie or something.

I'll grant you that VO's keyboard shortcuts are more two-handed than NVDA's, for example, but I just don't get the wistfulness y'all have got going on for one-handed keyboard operation. I'm clearly missing something and I'd love to know what it is. As it happens, I'm running a Windows VM and I have access to NVDA and Narrator. So I'm happy to go compare operations between the three of them, although I am on a laptop keyboard, no numpad, in case that matters. I do have a keyboard with a numpad though, if that's really necessary to use for comparison, so I can do that no problem.

What's the stuff you're doing with one hand all the time? The stuff that makes you crazy if you can't do it? Does it come down to specific environments/tasks, or is it more general? I'm really interested to hear how people are working here.