This is a very timely thread. My wife had neck surgery a while back (two vertabrae are now fused together), and so she has to have the bars higher than her saddle. I've currently got her old Trek mountain bike setup with a high angle stem and mountain bike bars that raise up a few inches, and after some tweaking, we've got the geometry where she likes it. We do road biking exclusively. So, now I'm thinking of making her a present of a custom road bike built to those dimensions.

The quandry is the handlebars. She'll never use the drops on a road bike, so the end result is that braking is harder for her. Mountain bike bars, as stated earlier, have no opportunity for hand location variations. Without going into drops or extending reach very much, what would the best alternatives be?