Hi Steven,

Laptops developed specifically for people with disabilities are few and far between. You may be able to find a third party that modifies existing designs to cater for a particular disability, but if not, here are some guidelines that may prove useful.

Semi-ruggedised laptops are a good place to start as they can withstand accidental drops and keyboard spills. They don't come cheap though, the cheapest we've seen is the Dell Latitude ATG D620, which will set you back £1,179 -- nearly £500 more than the standard D620.

If military-grade toughness isn't a requirement, you could try an ordinary laptop with a few mods. Windows XP and Windows Vista both feature usability enhancement tools designed to help the physically and visually impaired.

To modify your computer for improved usability, we advise running the Windows Accessibility Wizard by clicking the Start button, clicking Run and typing 'accwiz' into the text box, then clicking OK. This lets you increase the size of text, decrease the screen resolution (to make things appear larger), and use Windows Magnifier -- a hovering magnifying glass application that increases the size of anything beneath it.

Deaf or hard of hearing users can enable visual cues for on-screen events, and those with poor motor skills can activate Sticky Keys, which makes it easier to use key combinations preceded by the CTRL or ALT buttons. If pressing buttons isn't physically possible, we'd recommend using the voice recognition in Windows Vista, which makes it possible to dictate entire documents and to control nearly every aspect of your PC with your voice alone.

Unfortunately there is no Speech Recognition Engine built directly in to Windows XP. You need to install the software recognition engine in Office XP, the Windows XP PLUS! Pack or install a third-party application, such as those from our Downloads channel.

Best of luck!