This guide explains the equipment you already use, what the new Morse trainer is, and exactly how a practice session works from start to finish. It is written for you, and also for anyone in your family who helps set things up.
You control your computer with a head switch. A switch is simply a button — yours is mounted where your head can reach it reliably, and pressing it sends a signal to the computer. The switch connects through a small box called a switch interface, and that box makes your press look, to the computer, like a key being pressed on a keyboard or a click of a mouse. The computer cannot tell the difference between your head switch and someone's finger on a keyboard. That is the whole trick, and it is a good one.
Right now, your switch works with a program called EZ Keys. EZ Keys is scanning software: it moves a highlight across letters and choices on the screen, and when the highlight lands on the one you want, you press your switch to pick it. Scanning works, and it has served you well — but it makes you wait. The highlight sets the pace, and you catch it.
Morse code turns that around. Instead of waiting for the computer to offer you a letter, you make the letter yourself, the instant you think of it. A quick press is a dot. A longer press is a dash. String a few together, rest for a beat, and the letter appears. You set the pace. The computer keeps up with you.
Your trainer is a single webpage called The Telegraph Room. It lives in one file that works even without the internet. A helper opens it in a web browser, and from that moment, your switch runs the show: every press of your switch — short or long — is heard by the trainer.
The trainer has five pages, chosen with the big buttons along the top. Learn teaches the letters a few at a time, in eight lessons, with sounds, pictures of each rhythm, and real words to key. Practice quizzes you on everything you have mastered, with a streak counter. Type and Speak is a free page where you key anything you like and the computer reads it out loud in its own voice. Chart shows every letter and its code, and can be printed for the wall. Settings is where your helper tunes the timing to fit you.
The heart of the screen is a strip of old-fashioned paper tape, like the ribbon that ran out of a real telegraph machine. Every press you make punches onto that tape — a round dot for a short press, a long bar for a long press — and when a letter is finished, it prints beneath the marks. You can watch your own words come off the tape, the same way operators did in 1844.
Above the tape is a timing meter. While you hold your switch, an amber bar grows. When the bar crosses the marked line, your press has become a dash, and the bar changes color to tell you so. In the beginning, watch that bar — it teaches your body exactly how long a dot and a dash feel. Before long you will not need to look at all.
The trainer and EZ Keys both listen to the same switch, so they take turns. When it is trainer time, your helper pauses or closes EZ Keys scanning, clicks once on the trainer window so it is in front and listening, and from then on your switch talks straight to the trainer. When practice is done, EZ Keys goes back on and everything is as it was. Nothing about your everyday setup changes.
If a helper ever wants to check that the switch is reaching the trainer, there is a simple test: open a blank Notepad window and press the switch. If a character appears or the cursor reacts, the switch is being seen as a keyboard, and the trainer will hear it perfectly.
The very first thing to do — before any lessons — is teach the trainer how you press. Everyone's short and long are different, and yours are yours. On the Settings page, a helper clicks the button called Calibrate her presses.
The trainer will ask you to make five short taps — just quick, comfortable presses, whatever quick means for you. Then it asks for five long presses — hold each one, then let go, whatever long means for you. That is all. The trainer measures your ten presses and sets the dividing line between dot and dash right in the middle of your natural rhythm, and it sets how long a rest finishes a letter based on your timing too.
If your timing changes — a tired day, a new switch position — just run calibration again. It takes thirty seconds. The trainer should always fit you, never the other way around.
Two settings are worth knowing about. The letter pause is how long you rest before the trainer decides your letter is finished; if letters keep finishing before you are ready, your helper can make this pause longer. The word pause, used on the Type and Speak page, adds a space after a longer rest; if spaces appear when you do not want them, that pause can be stretched or turned off entirely.
Open Learn and choose Lesson 1. The trainer shows you a huge letter — E — plays its sound, shows its rhythm as dots and dashes, and gives you a memory hook. Then it is your turn: key the letter. Get it right three times and it is mastered; the trainer moves you to the next letter, and a star marks your progress. Miss one, and nothing bad happens — the trainer gently shows you what your press actually said, plays the correct rhythm again, and waits for you to try again. There is no timer, no penalty, and no way to fail.
When all the letters in a lesson are mastered, the trainer gives you real words to key, letter by letter, built only from letters you know. Finishing three words completes the lesson and unlocks the next one. There is a Hear it again button any time you want the rhythm replayed, and a Skip button if one letter is being stubborn and you would rather come back to it.
Practice, on the next page, mixes up everything you have mastered so far — single letters, or whole words when you know enough of them. The streak counter climbs as you go. It is a game, and you are allowed to enjoy it.
This page is the reason for everything else. Key any letters you like, in any order. Rest a little longer between words and a space appears on its own. If you key a wrong letter, six quick dots in a row erases it — that is the traditional telegraph operator's "scratch that" signal, and it works here too. When your message is ready, a helper presses Speak (or you select it yourself), and the computer says your words aloud.
Start small: HI. YES. NO. Then names. Then, after Lesson 7, the big one — I LOVE YOU — with your family in the room.
The trainer is where you learn, but it is not where Morse ends. The same skill you are building transfers everywhere. Phones and tablets can take Morse typing through their Gboard keyboard, working together with switch access. And there are small devices, made by people who use Morse themselves, that plug into any computer and turn your dots and dashes into a full keyboard and mouse — every key, every click, every program, all through the one switch you already command. One of the best known was built by the family of Tania Finlayson, a woman with cerebral palsy who has used head-switch Morse code as her voice for most of her life.
That is the destination: not a trainer, not a lesson, but the whole computer answering to your rhythm. The trainer is simply the first mile — and you have already started walking it.