Microsoft continues to build inclusive accessories and features for its mainstream products and the company showed off more at its New York event on Thursday. It unveiled an Adaptive Touch feature that works on the “precision haptic trackpad” of the Surface Laptop Studio 2. During its keynote, the company called this the “most inclusive touchpad on any laptop,” and based on my early impressions, that claim might just be true.
Not a lot is currently known about how the feature will work, but I was able to spend some time with Microsoft’s accessibility program manager Solomon Romney to get a deeper understanding. Romney was born without fingers on his left hand and struggles to use standard touchpads on most laptops. Adaptive Touch allows him to drag his left hand on the glass-covered surface and not have the cursor jump around the screen.
The first thing to point out is that the adaptive touch feature currently requires a haptic trackpad to work, meaning at the moment it’s o
