Mouse Alternative

A mouse alternative is any input device or technique that lets a user perform pointer-control tasks — moving a cursor, clicking, dragging, selecting — without using a conventional mouse. For people with motor impairments, mouse alternatives include trackballs, head-pointer and head-tracking systems, eye trackers, sip-and-puff switches, mouth-operated joysticks, single-switch scanning, foot pedals, vision-based gesture recognition, voice-based pointer control (including non-speech vocalisations), and more recently brain-computer interfaces. No single mouse alternative works for every user or every task, and accessibility research has repeatedly emphasised that users often combine several alternatives depending on fatigue, context, and the current task.