How to: Disable the Slow Keys in Ubuntu

Some of you may have encoutered this annoying problem while working on Ubuntu, keyboard almost freezes and doesn’t respond unless you hard press a key. The mouse keeps working fine, but the keyboard messes up.

The problem persists every after restarting the Ubuntu powered machine, the keyboard works fine while logging into your user account, but then suddenly stops working normally and takes the keys to be pressed long to work. That’s irritating.

If you’re experiencing this issue right now, you must have tried looking it up in the Text Entry Settings on Ubuntu, but that doesn’t help.

What causes this problem

The problems occurs when somehow the slow keys option on Ubuntu are turned on. If you hold down the Shift key for more than 8 seconds, the slow keys will be turned on automatically.

When slow keys are activated by holding down the Shift key, a dialog like this appear:

You may disable/turn-off the keys at the same time using this dialog box, but if you click OK, you’ll have your keyboard freezed.

I don’t know when did I turned them on after which I encountered this problem, but then sorted this out after a bit of research.

The Fix

Now you know that slow keys have caused this issue, it is obvious that you have to disable/turn off the Slow keys to get rid of it. How would you do that? Just by following the below steps, don’t worry you won’t need your keyboard to follow the fix procedure.

Below steps are tested on and captured from Ubuntu 14.10 64bit.

Click the gear (settings) icon on your Ubuntu desktop, and select the System Settings option from the dropdown menu.
You are on Ubuntu System Settings now. Click the Universal Access icon as shown below:
Click the Typing tab in the Universal Access dialog.
Now set the slow keys to OFF as shown in the below screenshot.