I went to https://www.keyboardco.com/ and searched for left-handed and the keyboard in the photo popped up, as well as a bunch of weirder and wonderfuler ones.
I seem to remember non-blocking io with named pipes was unreliable, in the sense that the test suite of whatever-it-was (memory is reeealy sketchy, this was tens of years ago) would fail randomly often enough that we had to throw the easy solution away and do actual networking.
A bit like the .signature named pipe from fortune thing, where sometimes you got two signatures and sometimes none? Anybody remember that?