Read with Dragon (sort of): Kindle for PC

Although I’m able to turn pages and make good use of my BookChair, there are times that I would rather read on the computer. This is mainly because of neck trouble and trying to learn C++; getting the keyboard out of the way, setting the book on the keyboard table, turning the pages and hoping Dragon doesn’t pick that up, and glancing up and down from the book to the screen make it a little more cumbersome than I would like. I’ve been thinking it would be nice to just vocally switch windows; read the book on the screen, then go into Win32Pad to dictate some code.

It turns out that I can potentially do that now using Amazon’s Kindle for PC application, which is free (with the exception of the books, of course). I hadn’t had very high hopes for the application’s accessibility, considering that Amazon isn’t great with it (see the lack of captioning for Unbox video products). However, it’s actually not that bad. (Better with Vocola commands, which I will create shortly.) While all buttons must be accessed by mouse commands, actually reading isn’t a bad experience at all.

C++ without Fear was not available for Kindle, but C++ Primer Plus was, so I downloaded a free sample to test how Kindle PC would work with Dragon. To open a book, mousegrid to the Home button (yay, verbing nouns) and click it if it’s not already highlighted. Then, by the same method, double click the book icon. The clicking isn’t as tedious as it sounds because the buttons are large; the grid doesn’t require much narrowing. To turn pages, say “Go left” [previous page] or “go right” [next page]. Up and down do the same thing respectively. To turn multiple pages, say “Go <direction> <number>.”

Text is very clear, and there is a button to adjust the font size. There are also a Go To and a Bookmark button, but Kindle PC already saves your last position when you exit, so that you can open the book where you left off. Note that I didn’t say page number — Kindle doesn’t use them. That somewhat disorients me, but for something like a programming text I suppose it would keep me from getting overwhelmed. That is, seeing 20% read looks more encouraging than “Oh god, I have 900 pages left. Dammit I’m slow!”.

At the moment you can’t create notes, unfortunately. (Not that Kindle would be select and say compatible even if you could, but I’m hoping for something that would allow at least partial dictation, a la Foxit. You also can’t copy text, for understandable reasons, but that sucks for a programming book. I do wish there could be a PDF style layout option, by which I mean the possibility of an autoscroll feature. Kindle PC is nowhere near perfect, but it is passable.

Thunderbird 3 RC 2 with Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10

I am happy to report that nothing really got broken in trying to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 with Mozilla Thunderbird 3 RC 2. The toolbar buttons and menus are still accessible, and my custom buttons are still there, though I had to put them back again. Dragon’s Thunderbird 2 commands, like “next/previous message” and “write mail,” still work. Don’t be alarmed if the File, etc. menu is grayed out — you can still access it, as well as the submenus.

Please note, however, that you will need to use the Mouse Grid commands and Tab and Enter to get around the box and buttons for Tools — Options. They seem to have gone the route of Firefox 3, that way. Oh well.

The newest thing about it is the tabbed interface. When you highlight a message and click Read (if you have the button), your message will only open in a new window. But if you say “press Enter,” Thunderbird will open the message in a new tab. As with Firefox, you can speak a word in the tab — like “Inbox” — and Dragon will click the tab. EDIT: I may have spoken too soon. The only tab that Dragon will click is the 1st one, the main one — Inbox, or Sent, or whatever folder your messages are in. To navigate around any other tabs, you will have to use the “press Control <number>” command.

The “close tab” command doesn’t transfer, because Dragon obviously couldn’t apply that to Thunderbird 2. So you have to say “press Control W.” This is where Vocola or another add-on program might come in handy.

Another thing I like about Thunderbird 3 is that there seem to be more buttons included. A few I don’t remember seeing are Reply to List, Archive, and Restart. One of those may be a custom button I forgot about, but I don’t think so. There are also better keyboard shortcuts in Thunderbird’s menus to begin with, so that even if you don’t have a button, you can make a command if you have an add-on program.

Speaking of buttons, there are now automatically included buttons in each e-mail you open. Rather than putting the Delete, Reply, and other like buttons up in the toolbar, Thunderbird has put them above the message, by the subject and recipient lines. (If you use Skip Trash rather than Delete, you will still have to put the Skip button up in the toolbar. You can’t put it within the message.)

One thing I do want to mention is that if you’re using the custom Read button, you want to say “click to select columns to display,” and then uncheck “read.” If you don’t do that, then your Read button won’t work, because Dragon will click the tiny button labeled “click to sort by Read” instead of opening your highlighted message.

Another thing I want to mention is that there is still no total select and say support, but you can still dictate reasonably into a message field — though to be on the safe side, as with anything, you might want to dictate into your word processor or the dictation box first.

I haven’t tried any more add-ons yet, but will report when I do, and when I’ve had more of a chance to use the program. But for now it’s pretty cool.

Writing/communication aids: low tech

I’ve been thinking about writing aids. I write very seldom because it’s often hard to control the pen, and therefore slow and shaky and laborious. I waste a lot of paper when my capital letters go wavering across it like dismayed stick figures. And yet when my speech or my voice goes, that’s what I’m left with. (Yes, I do have an AlphaSmart, but it’s not something I can carry around just in case, and this happens so rarely.) There’s nothing as portable as a pen or pencil, if you’re able to use them.

I do carry an alphabet with me at all times — that is, I can fingerspell, though more slowly now than I’d like. The problem with that is most people can’t read it. It has worked a few times, though. If you think something like that would be useful, here’s a fingerspelling quiz with other links to learn the alphabet. If you literally want to carry an alphabet with you, you could print out a picture of a keyboard and point to the letters on it, or print out a table with common words on it. (I’m aware there are more expensive options out there, but the less expensive options tend to come to mind first. This goes for pretty much everything.)

But usually I find myself indicating pen and paper, with a very patient person reading over my shoulder. It’s inconvenient for both of us, at least in terms of the time it takes. I don’t know if any writing aids would stop the tremor or not, but the Evo Pen looks interesting. There are other possibilities on the ErgoCube site.

More buttons for Firefox and Dragon

I’ve mentioned the Custom Toolbar Buttons for using Firefox and Thunderbird with Dragon before, but am plugging it again because there are some navigation buttons I didn’t notice. These buttons would be especially useful for those who don’t use add-on command programs, but they may also simply reduce the syllables of an existing command if that’s important to you.

1. Find Again and Find Previous. This might be helpful for those using typeaheadfind.linksonly rather than Mouseless Browsing. If Firefox focuses on a word with multiple instances, saying “find again/previous” is more fluid than “press Control G” or “press Control Shift G.” However, it will be somewhat slower than the keypress command or a Vocola “find again” command since it uses cursor movement instead of keystrokes.

2. Close Other Tabs. Does exactly what it says, leaving only your current tab.

3. Snap Back. Goes to the first site you visited in the current tab. Useful depending on your browsing habits.

What Nuance needs to do in future Dragons

I have briefly used Windows Speech Recognition; a relative has Vista and asked me to fix her computer, so I set myself up an account and voice profile. For now, I’m still a Dragon follower for all of its flaws. I don’t think WSR has fully caught up yet, though what they do with it in Windows 7 should be interesting (and it has Vocola, too). However, I don’t think Nuance should be resting on their laurels with Dragon NaturallySpeaking anymore, either.

Here are some things I think Nuance needs to do if they want to keep their user base in the future. This list applies to Preferred; I think one or 2 of these things is available in the hideously expensive Pro version. If you have suggestions, feel free to comment.

• Fix the missing “mouse middle click” command code already.

• Build in the ability to press keys X number of times.

These are not unreasonable requests. We can do this with Vocola or other add-on programs, but these are not complex macros for individual programs that Nuance can’t be expected to anticipate or accommodate. These are basic keyboard and mouse emulation functions that work globally. I am incredibly grateful for Vocola, and encourage people to download it for as long as it is offered, because it does make programs a lot more accessible. After all, Nuance cannot possibly anticipate everything we want to use. This is what add-on programs should be used for. But basic keyboard and mouse replacement should be givens, and for ALL versions. Basic keyboard and mouse actions for general navigation should not be a “privilege” or a “bonus.”

I think Nuance is already getting a little bit desperate. Why else would they try to hook us with the line about Dragon 10.1 being “fully compatible” with Firefox 3? Holy borderline false advertising. Granted, it natively works a lot better than it did with 9+, but their definition of “fully compatible” must be different from mine. When most people see “fully compatible,” they’re going to assume that Dragon works exactly as well straight out-of-the-box as it does with IE. Most people are going to be very disappointed. This is because most people will not know how to tweak Firefox to make up for the elements that Dragon cannot yet work with.

Once you make some tweaks, Firefox is quite good, even if you don’t have an add-on command program. This is why I have not used IE for a very very long time. But Dragon itself CANNOT be compatible in the seamless sense of the word, because the Firefox developers have not written the browser in such a way that Dragon can fully “understand” everything. For Nuance to use such wording is dishonest.

So, here’s hoping that in the next version, Nuance actually listens to customer feedback. Nuance? Here’s another tip. If you want to send out customer satisfaction surveys, it is helpful to send out surveys for the products that your customers actually purchased. Please.

USB assistive technology: mind the license!

Assistive technology doesn’t have to be an “official” Portable App for you to install it on a flash drive, nor does it have to be freeware. (But no, you cannot install Dragon NaturallySpeaking on a flash drive.) It depends primarily on  2 things: the ability to choose the flash drive letter for the install location (creating a folder on the drive if necessary) and, ideally, the option NOT to create any shortcuts on the desktop or start menu. It’s just cleaner that way, though shortcuts won’t hurt anything provided you install from your home computer. However, even after you’ve done this, there is still something you may have to watch out for if you’re trying to use public computers — particularly if those computers are on a queue that assigns you to a random machine, e.g. in a library.

There are 2 main types of licenses when you purchase software: per computer and per user. If you’re going to use your flash drive on a public computer, it’s better if your software has a per user license. This means that the license belongs to you, which in turn means that you can use that software on any computer you operate. The only requirement for using per user software on a flash drive is that when you plug it in, you will need to enter the activation code (and possibly the name you registered it with), so DON’T LOSE THAT. I keep a file on my flash drive containing all of my activation codes, so all I need to do is copy and paste. This step is both necessary and beneficial. It’s necessary because in this setup, nothing gets permanently saved to the registry, which is why you need to activate each time. It’s beneficial for the same reason, especially if you can’t use the same computer each time.

If you have USB software with a license that limits the number of computers you can activate on, trying to use different computers becomes dodgy if not impossible. Shades of per-computer enter here, because the program has to count the installation on each machine. When you activate computer-specific software, it saves that activation to the registry — or at least tries to — so that each time you plug your flash drive into that computer, you can run the software without activating. This is problematic on public machines for a couple of reasons.

First, depending on the security settings of the public computer you’re trying to use, it may not like your attempts to modify the registry by activating the software. The software may thus crash or otherwise not run properly. I suspect this is what happened with Typing Assistant, and is partially why I sought other software. Typing Assistant limits its USB version to 3 computers. Even if you get the software to run properly, that kind of license assumes that you’ll always be able to use the same 3 computers. This does not allow for use in, say, a library where you are assigned to available machines at random. You will not always get the same 3 machines. Therefore, you will most likely be out of luck, which kind of defeats the purpose of portable software.

Per computer license agreements are almost always specified at the outset, so that you can decide if that works for your circumstances. Sometimes, per user licenses are also specified, but sometimes they aren’t. For example, I didn’t know Turbo Type had a good, portable per user license until I copied the program folder to my flash drive and tried to use it a couple of times stick typing on friends’ machines, and was pleasantly surprised. It may be that per user licenses are a given unless otherwise specified, but I would be careful in making that assumption. The best thing to do is try the demo of your program, if one exists, because it will usually explain the license to you in case you want to buy it when your time is up.

Control your DVD/CD drive with Dragon: AutoHotkey/Vocola

This script to control your CD/DVD drive by voice is optionally twofold. It requires AutoHotkey to assign it to a keypress, and Vocola or another Dragon NaturallySpeaking add-on to assign a voice command to that key if you wish. You would thus need to be running both for the latter to work. (See Product Sites sidebar to download.) If you don’t have an add-on program, you can do this by running only the AutoHotkey script and vocally pressing the key. Choose a key that you don’t use very often; mine is the | (vertical bar). If you absolutely need that key for something, exclude the application that requires it. (E.g. IfWinExist [, WinTitle, WinText, ExcludeTitle, ExcludeText]).

Telling Dragon to press that key or its command will both eject and close the tray, depending on its current position. I did try to do this using only Vocola, but AutoHotkey made it easier because it has that as a built-in script in its list of commands.

The AutoHotkey script:

|::
Drive, Eject
if A_TimeSinceThisHotkey < 1000
Drive, Eject,, 1
return

The Vocola script:

Drive (open | close) = {|};

Jarte free word processor now works with Dragon automatically

VERY IMPORTANT: Be aware that I am writing this as someone who uses a word processor almost exclusively for writing. If you try to insert a table, though, Jarte will give you a message saying that Dragon can’t handle that and link to Nuance support under the Help button so that you can tell Nuance there’s a problem. I think Carolina Road is being a bit optimistic about that, but what the hell, they’re trying — which is more than most developers would do. If you frequently use a word processor for anything other than word processing, Jarte (either free or Plus) may still not work for you. But if you mainly use word processors for writing, read on.

Most excellent news: the free version of the Jarte word processor (version 3.4) now works with Dragon NaturallySpeaking out-of-the-box, as does the $19 Plus version. (I’m using the free version right now because I had to do a reformat and the flash drive containing some of my backups malfunctioned.) Some kind person set the Detect DNS value to 1 by default, and the Settings.ini file repairs itself on restart if there’s a problem. With that in mind, I’m going to give a more thorough review of Jarte than the scattered mentions I’ve given in the past. Forgive the occasional repetition.

NOTE: You need to be using the Minimal layout in order to access the menu toolbar by name. Choosing the “use alternate main menu” option (Tools — O) gives you more menus to work with, such as Tabs, Counts, Options and Zoom, and moves Paragraph into its own menu instead of being under the Font menu. Note that to choose an option from the menus, you still need to say the first letter of the option and/or Enter.

General program remarks: You probably won’t need the spellchecker much if you’re using Dragon, but if you want it, you can navigate it by pressing F7 then using the arrow keys and Enter. The free version does not have the full autocorrect function — often used for shorthand — but if you’re using Dragon exclusively, you likely also won’t need the shorthand very much.

My dictation is very quick and accurate, and selection, correction, scratching, and general navigation (new paragraph, new line, go to top/bottom/end of line, insert before/after, etc.) commands work perfectly. You cannot select sentences, but you can use the command “select <word> through <word> <punctuation>.” The quick formatting commands in Dragon 10 don’t work, but you can still select the words you want to format and give the keypress commands, or use Vocola or other Dragon add-on commands.

I like Jarte because it’s very minimalist, and there’s no visual clutter to get in my way; I can concentrate on the words as they appear. Though Jarte does have an optional status bar (which you will need to have showing if you want to use certain Vocola commands), it does not slow down dictation or block it from view as the Word status bar does. Also, I have never had Jarte crash on me, as Word 2007 did/does.

Another good feature is the option to always reopen your last session. That way, if you’re working on a document over time, you don’t have to say “start <potentially multisyllabic document name>” if you don’t want to. I also like the tabs, so that you don’t have multiple windows on the bottom of your screen.

Jarte can handle Word documents as well as rich text format, and you can set it to be the default program for those file types if you wish. You may still need a compatibility pack for Word 2007; I haven’t checked. However, Jarte doesn’t support .odt yet.

One thing that Jarte doesn’t have is the ClearType font style, which I had gotten used to when I was using Word 2007. However, if you would like it, there’s a roundabout way of getting it — though not exclusively to Jarte itself. If you set ClearType for the whole operating system, you will have it using Jarte. The downside is that if you don’t want it in your whole operating system, you’ll have to turn it back off again when you’re done using Jarte. I don’t know if it’s worth the trouble for me to keep doing it, so I might just get used to the old font style again. These instructions for setting up ClearType apply to Windows XP, to which I am still clinging.

Right-click on the desktop and choose Properties.

Click Appearance.

Click Effects.

Tab to the checkbox about smoothing edges of screen fonts (it’s faster than saying the whole line). If it isn’t checked, press Space, then tab and choose ClearType, then OK, Apply and OK.

For me, this beats hell out of trying to tinker with OpenOffice Writer, and as I’ve said before, Carolina Road gets huge points for considering Dragon/speech recognition users right out of the box. For this reason, I may still purchase the Plus version again when I’m able, just to show that users of speech recognition are a viable market and will support developers who support them. Now, if someone would only develop an entire SAPI compliant Office alternative! (Besides WordPerfect, which I’m hearing isn’t so compatible anymore anyway.)

How to get “smart punctuation” with word prediction/completion

This AutoHotkey script is a way to make punctuating more efficient when using word prediction or completion with automatic spacing enabled. Using this script, you don’t have to backspace in order to punctuate after predicting a word. When you press the punctuation, the script will backspace for you, insert the mark, then space. That’s the first part. The second part accounts for times you may type an unknown word or otherwise not choose a prediction, so there would be no trailing space. This part specifies that if a letter appears before the punctuation, the script will only insert the mark, then space. I left the quotation mark alone because of the different inside/outside punctuation rules. OpusApp restricts it to Word.

#IfWinActive ahk_class OpusApp

#Hotstring *
::.::
Send, {bs}. `
return

::,::
Send, {bs}, `
return

::?::
Send, {bs}? `
return

::!::
Send, {bs}{!} `
return

::)::
Send, {bs})
return

#Hotstring ? *
::.::
Send, . `
return

::,::
Send, , `
return

::?::
Send, ? `
return

::!::
Send, {!} `
return

How to “edit” the Turbo Type prediction dictionary

If you’re using TurboType in the US and a word you want is behind several British spellings, it can take a while for your word to move up a level. However, if you really use that word often, you can trick the dictionary (a.k.a. lexicon) into bumping it up a level or so. In my case, the word was “programs” — it was behind “programme” and “programmes” so that I had to type the whole word before it appeared. But now, “programs” appears third after typing p-r-o-g. Much better. To speed the prediction process, I did the following (after typing “programs” many times and getting tired):

1. Click the TurboType icon and choose Add New Word.

2. Type the word you want to move up (or bury, as the case may be). It’s not technically a new word, but that doesn’t matter.

3. Pick a frequency number — but don’t overdo it! To bury a word you don’t use, set it to 1. To accelerate a word you want, 2 is safest to start.  (If it turns out you over- or underestimated the number, you can go to TurboType’s program file, edit that entry in the custom_words file and save the change.)

This is the closest thing to editing the dictionary and/or getting unused predictions out of the way. I also want to remind you that certain phrases are found by typing inward a little, especially if you’re predicting with a 2-letter threshold. For example, typing n-o offers “now,” but the phrase “now that” appears only after typing n-o-w. “Because of” appears after typing b-e-c-a. Experiment.