SteadyMouse v1

People with hand tremors install SteadyMouse v1 on Windows to damp out pointer jitter and suppress accidental clicks, filling a gap that Microsoft has never closed at the operating-system level.

ENABLE Model location

• Navigator-side Compensations → Use Assistive Technologies
• Navigator-side Compensations → Augment with Third-Party Tools

What it is

Benjamin Gottemoller began writing SteadyMouse in 2005 after his grandfather, Dr. James Gottemoller, was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and could no longer hold a cursor steady enough to finish a click. Gottemoller wrote the program in C++ while completing a computer engineering degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his grandfather "graciously offered himself as a test candidate during SteadyMouse's early days."¹ Gottemoller released the final version of the original line, SteadyMouse 1.3, on March 23, 2006, and has not updated it since.² The program runs on Windows, acts as a navigator-side assistive technology, intercepts mouse input before it reaches the cursor, filters out the high-frequency motion characteristic of tremor, and blocks clicks the user did not intend.²

Gottemoller kept v1.3 free for nearly a decade.¹ Users downloaded it from steadymouse.com, installed it on Windows XP and Windows Vista machines, and toggled it on and off through the Num-Lock key while they worked, traded stocks, edited photographs, or answered email.³⁴ Adam Darack, IT administrator for the town of Edgartown, Massachusetts, answered a reader's question in the Ask the Geek column of The Martha's Vineyard Times in November 2017 after "Frustrated Mouser" asked about tremor and the cursor. Darack tested SteadyMouse by deliberately shaking his own hand while moving the mouse, found the cursor held still, and recommended the software.³ Parkinson's UK lists SteadyMouse in its independent Tech Guide and notes that "the original version of SteadyMouse is available for free, but it hasn't been updated since 2006."⁴

In July 2016, Gottemoller incorporated SteadyMouse, LLC in Illinois and the company launched a commercial rewrite, SteadyMouse 2, in October of that year, priced at $43 for the current major version and $127 for a lifetime license that includes all future major versions.¹⁵³ The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Technical Reference Model authorizes SteadyMouse 2.x.x with constraints from 2025 through 2027 and beyond, describing the software as "accessibility software installed locally on a personal computer (PC) which enables users with Parkinson's disease and Essential Tremor to use a computer mouse."⁶ SteadyMouse, LLC continues to host the free v1.3 as a stopgap and explains on the download page that "it's good enough for some and not everyone can afford the commercial upgrade." The same page documents that "on Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and 10 the cursor sometimes goes crazy and flies off the screen," and discourages users from reporting v1 bugs because "all these original issues are fixed in SteadyMouse 2 and later."²

Why it matters

Xerox PARC, Apple, and Microsoft made the mouse the primary input device for personal computing through the late 1970s and 1980s, and the engineers who shipped those systems assumed a user who could hold a pointer steady. Microsoft shipped Mouse Keys in Windows 95 in 1995 as a keyboard-driven pointer substitute, and Apple had offered the same feature in Macintosh Operating System 4.2 in 1987, but neither vendor has ever shipped a native tremor filter into the default pointer pipeline.⁷⁸ In 2005, two engineers built the missing feature from outside. IBM researcher Jim Levine, after attending an IBM workshop on senior citizens and computing and watching his 70-year-old Uncle Murray Levine struggle to use a mouse, prototyped a hardware device called the Assistive Mouse Adapter, published the design in the IBM Systems Journal, and IBM licensed it to Montrose Secam, a small British electronics company that shipped it for under $100.⁹¹⁰ That same year, Benjamin Gottemoller, a computer engineering student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, began writing SteadyMouse for his grandfather.¹ The builder-side requirement-setting that would have made tremor-aware input a platform feature never happened. Instead the work moved to individual developers responding to relatives who could not use their computers, and the tool entered history in 2006 as freeware that substituted for a platform obligation Microsoft did not accept.

Disabled users reach SteadyMouse through family networks, hospital rehab departments, Parkinson's charities, Hacker News threads, and small-town IT columns, not through the desktop operating systems that ship on the hardware they actually own. Benjamin Gottemoller himself confirmed the pattern on Hacker News in August 2017, writing that "a lot of my customers are children and grandchildren finding SteadyMouse for an ailing grandparent."¹¹ Parkinson's UK lists SteadyMouse in its independent Tech Guide and discloses that the charity holds "no commercial or financial relationship" with the company, positioning the entry as community recommendation rather than vendor placement.⁴ Adam Darack, IT administrator for the town of Edgartown, Massachusetts, answered a reader writing as "Frustrated Mouser" in The Martha's Vineyard Times in November 2017, routing a tremor-affected reader to a filter that Windows did not supply at the OS level.³ SteadyMouse, LLC publishes an email address, financialaid@steadymouse.com, and tells prospective users "if you are struggling to make ends meet, send an email to financialaid@steadymouse.com explaining the situation, and we'll work something out."³ That channel routes individual price negotiation through the company's inbox and asks users to disclose financial hardship to an assistive-technology vendor in exchange for a discount the platform should have made unnecessary. Users who never write that email continue to rely on v1 or endure the inaccessibility without a filter at all.

For ten years, Windows users with tremor received tremor filtering at no cost because one grandson in Illinois chose to give it away. When demand grew enough to justify commercialization, Gottemoller moved the price to $43 or $127 through SteadyMouse, LLC and froze the free version at the March 2006 build. Microsoft, which sells Windows licenses to billions of users and markets accessibility features as a core platform commitment, kept the development cost of tremor-aware input off its own books by declining to develop one, leaving tremor-affected users to pay in dollars, time, or the residual use of a 2006-vintage stopgap that breaks on the Windows versions they now run. The VA Technical Reference Model authorizes v2.x.x with constraints through 2027 but does not authorize v1 for use on federal systems, so veterans with tremor who depend on VA-provisioned Windows machines receive the paid version through federal procurement while v1 remains the path for users outside that procurement channel.⁶ Marta Russell argued in Beyond Ramps (1998) and in the posthumous Capitalism and Disability (2019) that "entrepreneurs and rehabilitation specialists have made impaired bodies of use to the economic order...turning the disabled body into a commodity around which social policies get created or rejected according to their market value."¹² Gottemoller began giving the software away in 2005 as kin care, sold it as a product from 2016, and now counts the U.S. federal government among its licensees. The free v1 persists as residue from the period before the market formed around the same function.

Alison Kafer, in Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013), named the "curative imaginary" as the cultural premise that "not only expects and assumes intervention but also cannot imagine or comprehend anything other than intervention" in response to disability.¹³ SteadyMouse, LLC's mission statement, "to give people back what tremors have taken away," sits inside that imaginary and frames tremor as loss the tool restores.¹ The software itself does something different. Gottemoller's filter never touches the body, instead modifying the operating system's pointer pipeline to accept the motion the body actually produces. That adjustment tracks the social-model argument the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation first articulated in 1976, which defined disability as "the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organisation which takes no or little account of people who have physical impairments and thus excludes them from participation in the mainstream of social activities," and which Mike Oliver later formalized in The Politics of Disablement (1990).¹⁴¹⁵ Mia Mingus's 2011 formulation of access intimacy, care given "without having to explain the whole long story," describes what Gottemoller did for his grandfather in 2005 and what other family members replicate when they find SteadyMouse for an older relative and install it for them. The financial-aid channel preserves a trace of that same relationship against the commercial tier's demand for payment.¹⁶

Tremor-affected users lose measurable function at the computer, and older and later-stage users lose more than younger and earlier-diagnosed ones. Elan Louis and colleagues (2015) administered the Quality of Life in Essential Tremor (QUEST) questionnaire to 103 essential tremor patients and 103 matched Parkinson's patients in New York and found that tremor "sometimes, frequently or always interfered" with physical activities including writing and using a computer in a third or more of Parkinson's patients, and that essential tremor patients reported more impairment than Parkinson's patients across multiple quality-of-life domains.¹⁷ Louis and Benito-León estimate that essential tremor affects roughly 7 million people in the United States, with prevalence rising from 0.8% in adults aged 18-30 to more than 8% of those 85 and older.¹⁸ The mechanism runs through the mouse. SteadyMouse, LLC's reviews page records Seth Hardiman's father, a photographer, losing Photoshop as his tremors worsened, until Hardiman installed SteadyMouse and his father regained the software. A day trader named Aaron bought a stock by accident before finding SteadyMouse. Darren in Sioux Falls installed SteadyMouse on his 80-year-old mother's computer only after her trembling cursor had already made online banking unusable.¹⁹ The harm lands disproportionately on older adults, lower-income users, and users whose tremor progresses faster than their budgets. Paul Farmer's "structural violence" names injury and illness built into social arrangements such that no single actor is responsible, but the distribution of exposure and protection is nonetheless systematic and traceable, and the Windows default produces exactly that pattern in tremor-affected bodies.²⁰ Chronic exclusion from online banking, telehealth portals, government benefit applications, and remote work registers in tremor-affected bodies as lost income, missed medical appointments, and withdrawal from institutions that increasingly conduct business through a pointer Microsoft and Apple declined to filter.

SteadyMouse v1.3 restored computer access at no cost for a decade to an unknown number of Windows users, and SteadyMouse, LLC still hosts the installer for users who cannot pay for v2. Each Windows release since Vista has narrowed the set of machines v1 actually works on, and the company's own download page reports that "on Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and 10 the cursor sometimes goes crazy and flies off the screen," leaving the free tier functional primarily for the shrinking population still running Windows XP or Vista on their primary computer.² Users who cannot afford $43 and who also run a current Windows version fall back on the company's financial-aid email or go without a filter entirely. Microsoft has had more than two decades since Gottemoller's release and Levine's paper to ship native tremor filtering in Windows. As of 2026, Microsoft's own Q&A forum still directs tremor-affected users only to adjust the double-click speed in the Mouse Properties Buttons tab.⁸ Apple has had the same window in macOS and has shipped no tremor filter. The GNOME project distributes MouseTweaks on Linux as an installable package, not as a default. Gottemoller and SteadyMouse, LLC, through the financial-aid channel and the degraded free v1, hold the line Gottemoller opened in 2005, but that line now depends on a single small Illinois company rather than on structural commitments embedded in the operating systems that made mouse-based input mandatory in the first place.

Real-world examples

In the news

Ask the Geek: Steadymouse (November 2017)
-- Adam Darack, The Martha's Vineyard Times

• Darack, IT administrator for the town of Edgartown, answered a reader calling themselves "Frustrated Mouser" who asked how someone with hand tremor could use a computer mouse. He tested SteadyMouse by shaking his hand deliberately, found the cursor held still, and documented SteadyMouse, LLC's financial-aid channel in print. The column works as a community rediscovery of a navigator-side assistive technology that small-town IT departments end up recommending because Windows supplies no equivalent at the OS level.

In the news

IBM Unveils Mouse Adapter That Assists Hand-Tremor Sufferers (March 2005)
-- Antone Gonsalves, InformationWeek

• Gonsalves reported on Jim Levine's Assistive Mouse Adapter, a parallel 2005 project to SteadyMouse that placed a hardware filter between the mouse and the computer. Levine built the prototype after an IBM workshop on senior computer accessibility and after watching his 70-year-old Uncle Murray Levine fail to use a mouse. IBM licensed the design to Montrose Secam in Britain to sell for under $100. The piece documents the year in which two separate hand-built tremor filters emerged from relatives of older adults with tremor, while Microsoft and Apple continued to ship operating systems with no native tremor filter.

In the news

SteadyMouse (ongoing)
-- Parkinson's UK Tech Guide

• Parkinson's UK catalogs SteadyMouse in its independent Tech Guide, lists both the paid release and the older free version, and discloses that the charity holds "no commercial or financial relationship" with the company. The listing documents how a disability charity acts as a discovery channel for a navigator-side assistive technology when the OS vendor does not. A community commenter on the page describes the setup in terms of navigator labor. "Install, pick your level of anti-tremor, click speed and accidental right-click prevention, and away you go."

• The Microsoft Learn Q&A forum records a user asking, "Is there a mouse setting or mouse driver that can filter out the shaking movements of my hand?" Microsoft's official response directs the user to adjust the double-click speed in the Mouse Properties Buttons tab, and does not name any native tremor filter.⁸
• The Better Living Through Technology guide to mouse tremor solutions records that IBM's Assistive Mouse Adapter, "marketed by Montrose Secam Ltd," is "no longer available," leaving SteadyMouse as the principal surviving tool from the 2005 cohort.⁷
• The Department of Veterans Affairs Technical Reference Model authorizes SteadyMouse 2.x.x with constraints from 2025 through 2027 and beyond and describes the software as enabling "users with Parkinson's disease and Essential Tremor to use a computer mouse." The TRM does not list the free v1 as authorized on federal systems.⁶
• The Active Hands Company, a UK assistive technology retailer, sells SteadyMouse 2 at $43 and the lifetime SteadyMouse X at $127 with a 70-day money-back guarantee, matching the prices SteadyMouse, LLC charges direct.⁵
• User testimonials collected by SteadyMouse, LLC document specific use cases. Albert J. Bick, a CPA with a 2-year Parkinson's diagnosis, needed mouse control for his accounting work. Jon in Denmark installed SteadyMouse for his father, who lives with Parkinson's. William Spears has lived with essential tremor for 8 to 10 years. Darren in Sioux Falls installed SteadyMouse on his 80-year-old mother's computer after her hand trembling made the cursor unusable. A day trader named Aaron reported that his tremor caused an accidental stock purchase. Seth Hardiman's father, a photographer whose tremors ended his ability to use Photoshop, regained computer use after Hardiman installed the software.¹⁹
• On Hacker News in August 2017, Benjamin Gottemoller wrote that "a lot of my customers are children and grandchildren finding SteadyMouse for an ailing grandparent," naming the pattern of intergenerational installation that replaces platform-level access.¹¹
• The GPII DeveloperSpace accessibility master list, hosted by Raising the Floor International and funded by the European Commission, catalogs SteadyMouse alongside MouseTweaks (open source) and IBM's Mouse Smoothing Software as the principal anti-tremor mouse filtering tools. No OS-native entry appears because no mainstream desktop operating system ships native tremor filtering.²¹

What care sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Care at the requirement-setting and development stages would mean the operating-system vendor accepts tremor filtering as a platform obligation rather than leaving it to a grandson in Illinois:

• "We set tremor-aware input filtering as a default Windows accessibility feature, turnable on from the Ease of Access panel without a third-party download."
• "Our pointer pipeline runs a low-pass filter and accidental-click suppressor at the driver level, so every application in the OS benefits without each developer reimplementing it."
• "We tested the pointer filter against movement recordings from people with essential tremor, Parkinsonian tremor, and multiple sclerosis tremor before shipping, not after launch."
• "Our procurement specifies that workstations for users with motor tremor receive tremor filtering at install time, not as a reimbursable individual accommodation."
• "We funded maintenance of the free legacy version so that users who cannot afford the commercial release still receive a tool that works on current Windows."

What neglect sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Neglect sounds like treating tremor as an edge case the OS vendor can punt to the AT market:

• "Users with tremor can install a third-party utility if they need one. We don't need to build pointer filtering into Windows."
• "Mouse Keys already exists. If the mouse is too hard to use, they can switch to the numeric keypad."
• "Our accessibility team focuses on screen readers. Motor-input filtering isn't in our scope."
• "There's a market solution for that. Why would we build what someone is already selling?"
• "The free version from 2006 still works for some people. That's good enough."
• "If the veteran needs tremor filtering, they can request it as an individual accommodation through their care coordinator."

What compensation sounds like (navigator-side compensations)

Compensation describes the labor tremor-affected users perform when Microsoft has not built tremor filtering into the OS and the commercial fix costs money:

• "I downloaded the free SteadyMouse from 2006 and accepted that it would fight with Windows 10 because I could not pay $43 this month."
• "I toggle SteadyMouse on and off with Num-Lock every few minutes because the tremor shifts through the day and I have to keep retuning the filter myself."
• "I emailed financialaid@steadymouse.com and explained my situation so that a small-business owner in Illinois would discount the product the OS did not ship."
• "I stopped editing photographs on my computer because the cursor jumps more than Photoshop can tolerate, and I switched to paper and a scanner for the work I can still do."
• "I made a stock purchase by accident before I found SteadyMouse, and after that I called my broker by phone to make sure a double-click could not cost me again."
• "I installed SteadyMouse 1 on my 80-year-old mother's laptop because she could not click the buttons in her online banking app, and I accepted that I would drive over to reinstall it whenever Windows Update broke it."
• "I endured the misclicks for years before a town IT administrator mentioned SteadyMouse in a newspaper column I happened to read."

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All observations occur within the context of Windows desktop computing for people with essential tremor, Parkinson's disease, and multiple sclerosis in the United States and the United Kingdom, 2005 to the present.

Footnotes

1. SteadyMouse, "About." https://www.steadymouse.com/about/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

2. SteadyMouse, "SteadyMouse 1, Original Free Version." https://www.steadymouse.com/downloads/version1/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

3. Adam Darack, "Ask the Geek: Steadymouse," The Martha's Vineyard Times, November 7, 2017. https://www.mvtimes.com/2017/11/07/ask-geek-steadymouse/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

4. Parkinson's UK Tech Guide, "SteadyMouse." https://techguide.parkinsons.org.uk/catalogue/SteadyMouse ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. The Active Hands Company, "SteadyMouse Anti-Tremor Software." https://www.activehands.com/product/steadymouse-anti-tremor-software/ ↩ ↩²

6. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Technical Reference Model, "SteadyMouse." https://www.oit.va.gov/services/trm/ToolPage.aspx?tid=11407 ↩ ↩² ↩³

7. "Solutions for Mouse Tremors," Better Living Through Technology. https://bltt.org/solutions-for-mouse-tremors/ ↩ ↩²

8. Microsoft Q&A, "Handicap - Mouse setting to ignore shaky movement and erratic button clicks due to hand tremors," Microsoft Learn. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/2481538/handicap-mouse-setting-to-ignore-shaky-movement-an ↩ ↩² ↩³

9. Antone Gonsalves, "IBM Unveils Mouse Adapter That Assists Hand-Tremor Sufferers," InformationWeek, March 14, 2005. https://www.informationweek.com/it-leadership/ibm-unveils-mouse-adapter-that-assists-hand-tremor-sufferers ↩

10. James Levine and Yossi Schwartz, "A mouse adapter for people with hand tremor," IBM Systems Journal. https://research.ibm.com/publications/a-mouse-adapter-for-people-with-hand-tremor ↩

11. Benjamin Gottemoller, comment on "Steadying the Mouse for People with Parkinson's Disease and Multiple Sclerosis," Hacker News, August 2017. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15002570 ↩ ↩²

12. Marta Russell, Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1998); Marta Russell, ed. Keith Rosenthal, Capitalism and Disability: Selected Writings by Marta Russell (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019). https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1289-capitalism-and-disability ↩

13. Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), p. 27. https://iupress.org/9780253009340/feminist-queer-crip/ ↩

14. Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation, Fundamental Principles of Disability (London: UPIAS, 1976). https://disabledpeoplesarchive.com/fundamental-principles-of-disability-union-of-the-physically-impaired-against-segregation/ ↩

15. Mike Oliver, The Politics of Disablement (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990). ↩

16. Mia Mingus, "Access Intimacy: The Missing Link," Leaving Evidence, May 5, 2011. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/access-intimacy-the-missing-link/ ↩

17. Elan D. Louis et al., "Tremor-related quality of life: A comparison of essential tremor vs. Parkinson's disease patients," Parkinsonism & Related Disorders, 2015. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25952960/ ↩

18. Elan D. Louis and Julián Benito-León et al., "How Common is Essential Tremor? Update on the Worldwide Prevalence of Essential Tremor," Tremor and Other Hyperkinetic Movements, July 2021. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8269764/ ↩

19. SteadyMouse, "Reviews." https://www.steadymouse.com/reviews/ ↩ ↩²

20. Paul Farmer, "An Anthropology of Structural Violence," Current Anthropology 45, no. 3 (2004): 305-325. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/382250 ↩

21. GPII DeveloperSpace, "Anti-tremor Mouse Filtering," Raising the Floor International. https://ds.gpii.net/learn/accessibility-masterlist/anti-tremor-mouse-filtering ↩