Touch typing at your own pace

What research says about learning later in life

Touch typing is a motor skill, and motor skills are learned through repetition. A 2008 review that pulled together decades of research on motor learning across the lifespan reached an encouraging conclusion: although motor performance tends to decline with age, the ability to learn stays intact, and older adults can make considerable gains with practice.

In fairness, there is a second half to that finding. For fine hand movements, which include typing, most studies found smaller gains in older adults than in younger ones. The differences were larger for complex tasks, while for simple tasks younger and older people learned very similarly. The author concluded that the age-related decline in motor learning depends on the task and is not absolute.

An older finding by the psychologist Timothy Salthouse is interesting too. He studied skilled typists from about 19 to 72 years old. The older typists had slower reaction times and tapped their fingers more slowly, yet they did not type more slowly, apparently because they looked further ahead in the text than younger typists did. These were people who already knew how to type, not beginners. Still, it shows that once a skill is learned, age alone did not decide speed.

The practical takeaway is simple: expect that it may go a bit slower than it would for someone younger, and give yourself time. The Touchtypely course moves in small steps, and every lesson takes only 5 to 8 minutes.

Learning later in life may take longer. That does not mean it will not happen.

Emails and messages to family

Texting is now the leading way adults 50 and older stay in touch, according to AARP's 2026 tech trends research. Email, video calls and messaging apps are part of everyday life for many grandparents, too.

You can tap out a short reply with one finger. A longer email, a birthday note or a letter to a grandchild away at college is a different matter. When your fingers know the keyboard, your eyes can stay on what you are writing and you do not have to interrupt a thought to look for the next letter. One limitation up front: Touchtypely teaches typing on a physical keyboard, not thumb typing on a phone.

The course uses the standard US QWERTY keyboard on Windows or Mac. The @ sign you need for every email address, along with punctuation and the dollar sign, has its place in the sixth module on numbers and symbols.

A longer email is easier to write when you are not searching for letters.

Banking, Social Security and the doctor, from home

More and more of everyday life has moved online. With a my Social Security account at ssa.gov, you can see your Social Security Statement and benefit estimates. If you already receive benefits, you can also get a benefit verification letter, change your address or direct deposit, and request a replacement Medicare card. Medicare.gov is where you look up coverage and compare plans.

Doctor visits have moved online for many people as well. According to the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, 43.3% of adults 65 and older used telemedicine in 2021, more than any other age group. Patient portals let you message your doctor, request a refill or read test results, and all of that means typing.

Online banking, bill pay and shopping work the same way. Each of these involves writing something: your name and address in a form, the text of a request, a message to the bank or the clinic. When you do not need to look at the keys, your eyes stay on the form and you can see exactly what you are filling in.

One more benefit of keeping your eyes on the screen: it is easier to read carefully. Be cautious with any email, text or call that asks for a password, a code or your Social Security number. Banks and government agencies will not ask for those out of the blue.

A form is less stressful to fill in when your eyes stay on the screen.

Your own pace, short exercises

A Touchtypely lesson takes 5 to 8 minutes, and you can repeat it as often as you like. Daily training can be set to 5, 10, 15 or 20 minutes. It is built automatically from your weak keys, keys that are starting to slip, and a practice text from a genre you choose.

Short, regular practice has research behind it. In a classic 1978 study, British postal workers learned to type on different schedules. Hour for hour, the group that practiced one hour a day learned most efficiently, and the group with two two-hour sessions a day did worst. The study did not test five-minute sessions. We recommend short daily lessons because they rest on the same principle: spread your practice over many days.

Speed is not the only measure that matters. In a small 2018 study at the University of Groningen, younger adults (18 to 30) and middle-aged adults (50 to 67) spent two hours on typing and mouse tasks. As time went on, the younger group's typing accuracy dropped, while the older group's did not. In Touchtypely you see your accuracy after every exercise, right next to your speed.

Short, regular and at your own pace.

Eyes on the screen, not on the keys

Researchers at Aalto University in Finland watched 30 people type using motion capture and eye-tracking glasses. People who had never learned touch typing spent about twice as much time looking at their fingers as trained typists did. Their speeds were not very different. The point of touch typing is less about raw speed and more about letting your attention stay on the screen.

On the Touchtypely screen you see a colored keyboard and a pair of hands, with the next key and the finger that should press it highlighted. So you do not need to look down. On the F and J keys you will feel small bumps that help your index fingers find their place without looking.

If the text looks small, enlarge the whole page in your browser: on Windows hold Ctrl and press the plus key, on a Mac hold Cmd and press plus. Use minus the same way to make it smaller again.

When you are not looking down, you can see what you are writing.

A comfortable chair and a well-placed screen

If you wear bifocals, you probably look at the screen through the bottom of your lenses and tilt your head back to do it. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) suggests lowering the monitor, even below the usual recommendation, and tilting it slightly back. A higher chair can help, and so can a separate single-vision pair of glasses for computer work. Your eye doctor can tell you which glasses suit you best.

Your eyes get a rest when you look at something far away from time to time, such as a clock across the room. With a smaller screen, OSHA notes that you may need to enlarge the text.

For sitting, OSHA recommends these basics:

• head upright, facing forward and in line with your torso,
• shoulders relaxed, elbows close to your body and bent at roughly 90 to 120 degrees,
• wrists and forearms straight and roughly parallel to the floor,
• feet flat on the floor or on a footrest,
• screen directly in front of you, about 20 to 40 inches from your eyes, with the top at or slightly below eye level.

We make no health claims. But sitting comfortably is a good start to any practice session.

Memories and family history

You may be the one who knows who is in the old photographs, where the family recipe came from, or what life was like in your hometown years ago. Memories written on a computer can be added to and corrected at any time, printed for the whole family or sent by email.

When you write down memories, you are thinking about what to say and how to say it. The less attention your fingers need, the more you have left for the story itself.

Touchtypely practice texts come in genres such as history, science and business. After each text comes one short question about what you just typed, so you exercise your attention along with your fingers.

Start small: one memory a week, even half a page. It does not have to be perfect right away. You can polish it later, when typing comes more easily.

Stories that only you know deserve to be written down.

Progress you can see in numbers

Start with a typing test to see where you are today. It runs for 30 seconds, 1, 3 or 5 minutes and you can repeat it whenever you like, so you can see how your typing changes over weeks and months.

After every exercise you see your words per minute, accuracy and error rate, your corrected and uncorrected errors, your rhythm, your reaction time on each key and the keys you mix up most often.

There is no need to compare yourself with charts online. In the large study of about 168,000 typists by Aalto University and the University of Cambridge, the average was about 52 words per minute, but participants averaged 24.5 years old and three quarters were between 11 and 30. The comparison that matters is with yourself.

On the leaderboard, others see only a first name or nickname and, if you choose, your city or state. You can turn it off at any time in settings. After the final exam you receive a certificate with a public verification link. It is a personal record of your progress, not an official credential.

The most important comparison is with yourself a month ago.

How to get started

There is nothing to install. Touchtypely runs in a current browser on a desktop or laptop with a physical keyboard, on Windows or Mac. The first lesson starts with the F and J keys and the space bar.

Learning alongside others can make it more fun. Many public libraries and senior centers offer computer help, and a friend or grandchild can be good company for a typing test.

Here is what we suggest at the start:

• in the first week, just a typing test and the first lessons, no goals,
• set daily training to 5 minutes and make it longer only when you want to,
• before you practice, adjust your chair and screen and enlarge the page if needed,
• if a lesson did not go well, simply repeat it, because this is practice, not a test,
• check your speed once a week rather than every day.

Start with one lesson. The next one will wait until you are ready.