Most of us 'talk' to our computers with a keyboard, as this is by far the most familiar way to enter information. There are, however, circumstances in which a keyboard might not be the best, easiest or even the most practical way of communicating with your computer.

Physical disability can make keyboard use impossible, for example, and sometimes the source material with which you are working may not be suitable for typed transcription. Retyping long, printed documents can be tedious and if you have neither the time nor inclination to learn touch typing, you may yearn for a more productive alternative.

Similarly, should you want to transfer music scores to your computer, the humble QWERTY keyboard may simply not be up to the job.

If your keyboard gives up the ghost at a critical moment, the question of alternative input methods becomes all the more important, but there are short-term remedies for just such an emergency.

Windows XP features a mouse-driven, on-screen keyboard, which you can access by going to the Start menu, choosing Programs, Accessories and then Accessibility. This can get you out of a strictly temporary jam. For anything more demanding than an unfinished paragraph, however, read on.

Getting mouthy
Perhaps the most obvious approach to keyboard-free input is voice recognition technology. With voice recognition technology, you speak into a microphone, the application analyses your every utterance with reference to a built-in vocabulary of known sounds and converts your speech into words, which appear as on-screen text.

By taking context into account and looking at the bigger picture, or rather the bigger clause, voice recognition can also identify the correct option when confronted with similar-sounding alternatives; 'to', 'too' and 'two' is an obvious example, 'one' and 'won' is another.

Still, throw in regional accents, specialist vocabularies and all manner of verbal vagaries and it's little wonder that no voice recognition application gets it right first time or, indeed, every time.

There are three keys to using voice recognition software successfully. First, ensure that your computer is up to the task. Ideally, your computer should have at least 128MB of memory and a Pentium III or faster processor.

A good quality headset with a microphone that cuts out background noise is essential, but this should come bundled with any voice recognition application.

Second, take time to 'train' your software properly. The enrolment period involves reading aloud set passages so that the application can analyse your pronunciation and phrasing and compare this with the text.

A 10 or 20-minute training period at the outset improves word recognition accuracy immeasurably. It is also important to correct mistakes within the program on a word-by-word basis. If you edit the final text with a keyboard, the program is none the wiser but show it the error of its ways and it learns from each mistake.

Finally, decide what you hope to achieve with voice recognition and shop for software accordingly. The two market leaders in this field are IBM ViaVoice and Dragon NaturallySpeaking. You get the same core voice recognition technology in the cheapest standard release as you do in the pricier professional-level editions, but there are important choices to be made.

For example, you'll need the more expensive Preferred edition of NaturallySpeaking if you want hands-free web surfing features and only the Advanced or Pro editions of ViaVoice offer transcription of pre-recorded sound files.

This last feature is a real boon if you use a handheld dictation device in the course of your work, as you can simply transfer the sound file you have created to your computer, feed it through the voice recognition application and emerge with a typed transcript of your thoughts.

Scansoft has recently launched Dragon NaturallySpeaking Mobile, a package that includes a dictation recording device and voice recognition software. Priced at £200, however, this is more likely to be of interest to those users who rely on voice recognition over and above a keyboard.

Voice recognition results are comparable between ViaVoice and NaturallySpeaking. While 100 per cent accuracy is a pipe dream, with training and patience you should achieve upwards of 95 per cent accuracy with either product.

There is one central difference, though: ViaVoice is primarily a productivity tool designed for keyboard-free dictation, whereas NaturallySpeaking offers complete hands-off control of your computer so you can surf the internet, for example, without needing to lift a finger. If you can do it with a keyboard or a mouse, you can do it with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

Scan fan
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology deals with the printed rather than the spoken word. Ordinarily, when you scan a page of text, what you end up with is an image file saved on your computer.

You can read the document on your computer screen, take it with you on a disk when you travel, or print out copies of it. What you can't do is edit the text using a word processor, a factor that frustrates and bamboozles many novice scanners. To do this you need OCR software that is smart enough to turn pictures of words into 'live' editable text.

The success of the conversion of a scanned document to editable text is largely dependent on the quality of the original material; a high-contrast, laser-printed document will scan beautifully, whereas a crumpled, yellowed newspaper clipping or a photocopy of a photocopy of a fax will not.

In all but the most basic OCR programs, however, you can correct recognition mistakes using a keyboard or a voice recognition program.

OCR is a much simpler trick than voice recognition and programs tend to be judged not just on accuracy alone, but on how well they preserve the original formatting of a scanned document, including columns, image positions and font characteristics.

A scanner is usually a pre-requisite but many applications also accept standard image files as input. You could, for instance, use a digital camera to photograph a recipe in a friend's book, transfer the image to your computer, run it through an OCR application and emerge with a customisable Word document.

Some programs also let you use Acrobat PDF files as source material, which is an effective way of circumventing the PDF format's read-only restrictions.

Both OmniPage Pro and Readiris Pro, two of the most popular OCR programs, accept scans, images and PDFs as input and let you save results as PDF files, Word documents and even as HTML. Both programs cost around £100 but you can buy a new scanner with a bundled, cut-down OCR program for much less than that.

The CanoScan LiDE 20, for example, can be bought for around £46, including delivery, and comes with a cut-down version of OmniPage. You may not get all the features or quite the same level of accuracy with bundled software, but it should be all you'll ever need for occasional OCR use.

Note perfect
If you've ever had a hankering to get in touch with your inner music maestro and master MIDI - a technique whereby musical arrangements are encoded as sets of instructions which your computer can use to 'play' virtual instruments - music OCR might be just up your street.

Music OCR works in much the same way as text OCR in that printed material, in this case a musical score, is scanned, analysed and transcribed. The result of a successful project is, likewise, fully editable, but not in the way that you might imagine.

Rather than dragging and dropping crotchets from stanza to stanza, what you end up with is a MIDI file that can either be played back using software like Windows Media Player, or edited in a MIDI application. At its simplest, a scanned score will reward you with a synthesised piano rendition of the original.

This is a great way of hearing a new tune if you're learning to read music or play an instrument and all you have is the sheet music.

We played with PhotoScore MIDI Lite, which is bundled with Readiris Pro, and SharpEye Music Reader. The odd bum note here and missed beat there notwithstanding, were much impressed by the program's ability to read and transcribe.

All joined up
Another way of entering information without a keyboard is with handwriting recognition software. Such software has long been bundled with handheld computers, the idea being that you jot notes down as you travel, convert them to text and open the finished article as a document in your favourite word processing application.

It now comes as standard equipment on Tablet PCs, although you are unlikely to shell out upwards of £1,000 for the thrill of handwriting recognition alone.

There are many variations on this particular theme, but it boils down to a choice between writing normally (or nearly so) and learning a new language of symbols. Symbol-based systems like Graffiti, featured on some handhelds, are a little onerous because you have to adapt to suit the software, but it is reasonable to expect near-100 per cent accuracy.

Natural remedy
However, the alternative, natural handwriting recognition, is certainly an attractive concept. In Office XP, for example, you can launch Writing Pad and watch your handwritten text appear as text on-screen, or use the Write Anywhere feature to pen your thoughts directly into Word, Excel and Outlook.

As long as your handwriting is halfway legible (and you'd be surprised what years of keyboard use does to it), your every scrawl is transcribed to text with remarkable accuracy. Alternatively, you can elect to have your scribbles appear on the page without conversion to text, which is ideal for signing documents or annotating joint projects.

The obvious question is: what do you write with? In practice, a mouse is a horribly unnatural substitute for pen and paper. If you are serious about adopting handwriting recognition as an alternative to typing, you need to invest in a graphics tablet. Wacom is the market leader here and its new Graphire 3 range hits the mark.

If you don't have Office XP, look no further than SoftWriting, an application which transcribes handwriting into editable text. You can either write directly into the application or, better still, scan in handwritten pages and have themconverted to text en masse.

The only real restriction is that SoftWriting baulks at joined-up lettering so you may have to modify your writing style. Follow the short software training procedure, which works very much like voice recognition enrolment, for best results.

We would never advocate tossing a keyboard on the tip for the sake of it, but there are viable alternative technologies out there to help you input information into your computer, if needed.

We hope that improved and ever-more affordable options will continue to be developed, partly to aid productivity but, much more importantly, to open the door to computing for people who are currently hampered in their computer use by the rigid restrictions of the keyboard.

Enabling technology
As we mentioned at the outset, physical disabilities affecting the hands or arms, ranging from mild Repetitive Strain Injury to total immobility, can make keyboard use awkward or even impossible. So too can learning difficulties.

Geoff Durkin is a Consultant Assessor with AbilityNet, the national charity that uses technology to help people overcome hurdles brought on by disability. He outlines some of the benefits of alternative input technologies.

"Voice recognition technology is often helpful to people with dyslexia because they are generally much better at using expressive language through speech rather than in writing," he explains.

"There can still be difficulties, however, particularly with correcting errors and during the enrolment process when you train the software by reading selected passages of text. This is why it is vital to match the technology to the person, not the other way around, and to provide ongoing support.

"With the right help, it is possible to control a computer completely with alternative technologies like voice recognition packages, even if you have never used one before.

"It also helps enormously when software is amenable to voice commands - shifting blocks of data around in a database or spreadsheet is a very different matter to simple dictation - and we would like to see software developers design their products to be fully accessible."

AbilityNet can be contacted on 0800 269545 or at www.abilitynet.org.uk.