Journal · September 29, 2026
You Don't Need an Account to Learn to Type
A typing practice tool for a child should open and work. It shouldn't ask for an email address before the first keypress.
My son Kingsley is non-verbal, and his AAC device has been his primary way to communicate in detail. We understood early on that if he could learn to type while other children were learning to write, we might help unlock another path for him to express himself.
We worked with his school to find software where he could practice at his own pace. What we kept finding was frustrating: children’s typing sites covered in ads and gated behind logins. I kept coming back to the same question: what could a typing practice site possibly need his email address for?
An account can make sense when an app needs to save work across devices, manage a class, or keep track of something the user actually wants to retrieve. But for a simple practice activity, the account often feels like a toll booth placed before the useful part. The child wants to practice typing. The parent is asked to hand over an email address first.
I can’t know what every site does with the information people provide. But the combination of ads and required sign-ups made me worry that collecting attention and contact details had become part of the business model. Anyone who has looked through their own or a relative’s inbox knows how easily a signup can lead to messages they never wanted. At best it’s clutter. At worst, an unexpected email becomes an opening for a scam.
When I was a kid, Flash games did not need an account to be fun. If a game needed to remember progress, it might show you a level selector or give you a passcode to write down and enter later. You could have levels and achievements without sharing your personal information. It was a simple kind of gamification: enough structure to make you want to keep playing, without turning every activity into a profile.
That old approach is still useful. Not every experience needs to remember you. Not every app needs an inbox to send messages to. Sometimes the right design is to let someone open a page, do the thing, and leave.
For a child learning to type, the first interaction should be the keyboard—not a registration form. If saving progress is important, there are ways to make it optional and explain why it exists. If it isn’t important, skip it.
This is one of the principles behind PicTyper and the software we want to make at Dressler Tech: ask for only what the product needs. If a tool can work on the device without an account, let it. Make the useful part easy to reach, especially for the people who need it most.