Hey programmers! We’re down here!

It strikes me that half the e-mail I get in my inbox is useless to me. All the technological newsletters talk about is Windows versus Linux/UNIX, open source or “indie” software versus Microsoft, and so forth. If you depend to any great extent on speech recognition, you still don’t have a choice. It’s usually Windows and Microsoft all the way, because like it or not, Microsoft is the only one who’s explicitly going to make things accessible for us. (Not everything — see Visual Studio — but more than most.) Many programmers don’t seem to give a damn, or they’re quick to blame everything on Nuance or Windows Speech Recognition. (There are a few exceptions, e.g. Jarte.)

Now, it galls me to stick up for a company whose technical support is rude and/or clueless, and who’s taken to borderline false advertising, but I will say this much: at this point, Nuance seems to have done as much as they can. Compatibility with assistive technology goes 2 ways. Speech recognition can’t work fully with applications that don’t support SAPI. SAPI is the brain, or central nervous system, of speech recognition. Speech recognition can’t run on anything else but SAPI. Supporting SAPI-dependent technology is, like it or not, the other programmer’s job. Also, it looks even worse if the other programmer can’t even be bothered to use general menu controls such as Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) or its successor. MSAA is not SAPI, but it helps a lot when we want to access menus vocally.

Compared to something like screen magnification or screen readers, speech recognition is a newer technology (though it’s been around for quite a while), so I don’t fault programmers for being possibly unaware of SAPI. Also, I am aware that integrating technologies is difficult and takes time. So I don’t fault programmers for saying that it’s difficult, or having to go through quite a lot of trial and error. But from some of the attitudes I see — “Oh, it’s faster for me to just reach over to the keyboard and mouse, why would you need speech recognition?” “I can type 100 words per minute, that’s lazy” — it looks on a bad day like they just can’t be bothered. If compatibility can’t be achieved because of a genuine program-language barrier, that’s understandable and acceptable. But what gets me is that, with so much apathy, there’s no way of knowing whether the problem is that nobody can do it, or just that nobody’s thinking about it. If you’re one of the programmers trying to do something about it, I’m not referring to you, and I thank you.

P.S. I don’t mention Macs because they do, at least, have MacSpeech Dictate — though I hear it’s still catching up to the Windows Dragon. Also, I am aware of the OpenOffice API Project, though I don’t know if they’d have anything to do with SAPI. I am also aware that Linux truly cannot physically support Dragon, as is explained here.

Portable Apps: Portable word completion

Unfortunately, public computers are not great (yet) at being accessible to those with physical disabilities. Most often, the barrier is money. Open source software may eventually change some of that, but for now a lot of network folks still need to be convinced that these programs are even worth installing.Until then, you have at least one option — how well it works will depend on your other hardware or software needs and whether you can bring them with you also. If you’re in a public place like a library that only gives you a set amount of time on a machine, and you need word completion or shorthand in order to work efficiently, I suggest downloading the portable version of Open Office from Portable Apps. Portable Apps will install programs like Open Office onto any flash drive you have, provided you have enough space — your flash drive doesn’t have to be U3. The catch is that once Open Office is on the flash drive, you will have to program your shorthand into the AutoCorrect replacement table again, the instructions for which are here. Once you have done that, however, you can load your flash drive into any public computer, run the program, and type with both abbreviation expansion and word completion enabled.

If for some reason you cannot use a flash drive, there is another more roundabout solution. If the public computer is running Microsoft Word, you will be out of luck if you want word completion, but your shorthand might still be of some good to you. When you are typing, simply use your shorthand as you normally would. It will not expand — it will be entered as it is. Before your time on the computer is up, save the document (in 97/XP/2003 format) and e-mail it to yourself. When you get home, open the attachment in Writer. Then, go to the Format menu and look under AutoFormat. If “while typing” is checked, uncheck it. Then, go under AutoFormat again and click Apply. Your shorthand should expand. If it doesn’t, you might have to go under Tools — AutoCorrect Options– Options and make sure the box for “use replacement table” is checked for M (modifying existing text). Also note that you will only run the replacement once. After you’re done, you can go back to AutoFormat and check “while typing” again, and go into the AutoCorrect replacement table and check T (while typing).

Portable Apps has Firefox also, so you can have Mouseless Browsing or whatever add-ons already set up. It also offers an onscreen keyboard. Unfortunately, it’s only the Windows “lite” version, which most public PCs have already. I wish they’d make a portable Click-N-Type.

Making Dragon 9.5 work with Firefox

I am very fond of Mozilla Firefox lately; I have version 2. It’s absolutely a more keyboard friendly browser, what with Mouseless Browsing133 and Bookmark Keys. It also works fine with a SmartNAV pointer and a dwell clicker or on-screen keyboard. But I have really been needing to give myself a rest, and was sick of going back and forth between IE 6 — Dragon’s favorite — and Firefox depending on what my level of mobility was. So I called up Firefox with Dragon and found that Firefox has become my universal browser.

However, Firefox is not totally voice accessible out-of-the-box. You must have Mouseless Browsing installed. If you don’t, you will have to say the entire name of a link in one breath to access it. With Mouseless Browsing, all you have to do is find the number next to the link and say “numeral [whatever].” Also, though Dragon supports basic Firefox commands such as “go to address,” “go there,” “go back/forward,” “refresh,” etc., there is no “text field” command like there is in IE. Thus, getting into search boxes can be a bit of a problem. Again, this is where Mouseless Browsing comes in. Text fields count as form elements. Under the Tools — Add-ons menu, go to the options for Mouseless Browsing and make sure the box “enable IDs for form elements” is checked.(You may also want to check the box that says “execute automatically without pressing enter.”) Once you do that, you can get into a text field simply by saying the number next to the field. Perfect.

Making Dragon 9.5 work with Open Office

Just because Dragon doesn’t advertise support for something doesn’t mean you can’t make it work to some extent. One of these things is Open Office, specifically Writer. Granted, there are caveats — it’s not going to work as seamlessly with Dragon as Microsoft Word, simply because it wasn’t made to. But, despite this oversight, it will absolutely work for you in a pinch with the right workarounds.

Summary: dictation is excellent. “Select that [or word],” “correct that,” “cap that,” and “scratch that” all work, as do “insert before/after.” So do “new line” and “new paragraph.” You can also say “select the paragraph,”as long as your cursor is at the beginning of the paragraph, and “select line.” “Select all” works too.

Some caveats: Do not under any circumstances perform a vocal or manual left mouse click anywhere in your document, because then you are locked out of going back and correcting anything by voice from then on, even if you close and reopen the document. I don’t know why that is. Occasionally, if you open a saved document and start dictating with the insertion point at the end of a word, you have to say the space yourself. Next importantly, if you want to bold or italicize something, you cannot use the natural language commands. Instead, to italicize something you would say “press control I,” your text, and then “press control I” again to turn off the italics. Alternately, you could say the text first, then tell Dragon to select it, and then say “press control I.” For bold and underlined text, you would do the same with B and U.

Actually, you need to know keyboard navigation commands throughout Open Office because you can’t access the menus by natural language either. To save your document, don’t say “save,” but rather “press control S.” I’m familiar with keyboard shortcuts so this doesn’t bother me, but it requires some memorization if you’re not. There is a very helpful shortcut, though. While you cannot left click in the document, you can absolutely right click. Performing a right-click brings up the context menu. This menu includes the basic formatting options, such as font and font size, bullets, and line spacing. So, if you wanted to double space your document, you would say “mouse right-click,” then “press I” because that letter is underlined in the option for “line spacing.” Then you would say “press D” for double.

Writer also has its own shortcuts built in, which you can see by pressing Alt T, then C, then tabbing over to Keyboard. Saying any of those will perform the corresponding function, and some are blank so you can use them for what you want. What Dragon can’t do by natural language, you can make it do by saying the keys. If something happens to Word and DragonPad doesn’t have enough formatting capabilities, Writer works well enough, with caution.

Bless the programmers part 2: free abbreviation expansion!

An even more useful tool in Writer is the replacement table, which is what the program uses to correct your typos. I can spell, thank you very much, and I don’t type quickly enough to make careless errors. So, I decided to use the replacement table to make Writer do abbreviation expansion. I deleted the dictionary of typo corrections and set up a large dictionary of my own. Now, instead of useless things like “ebuot” being replaced with “about”, I can expand words and phrases I use a lot. “sth” is replaced with “something,” “dsp” is replaced with “despite the fact that,” and so forth. There is a pretty large threshold for this; I have a ton of abbreviations and room to add more.

To create abbreviation expansions:

* Tools
* AutoCorrect
* Replace
* Enter your shorthand into the “Replace” column
* Enter the corresponding full word or phrase into the “With” column
* New
* OK

OpenOffice word completion

I was thrilled to discover OpenOffice, specifically Writer. I was stunned when I went into the language options and discovered that Writer had built word completion capability into the program. It is refreshable, meaning that you have to load pre-existing documents first and then close them, which puts all the words into memory so Writer can predict them in your new document. Its threshold is 10,000 words, and the minimum for how long a word has to be for Writer to predict it is five letters. Writer offers a choice after typing the third letter. Its choices are single and alphabetical, so that if you have words alphabetically close together you continue typing until you reach the one you want, then press enter. The program also automatically inserts a space after the word if you choose.

To activate word completion:

• Tools
• AutoCorrect
• Word Completion
• Enable word completion
• Append space (optional)
• Collect words — when closing a document, save the list for later use with other documents