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.

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.

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.)

Vocola commands for Win32Pad

# Voice commands for win32pad

new document = {Ctrl+n};
open document = {Ctrl+o};
save document = {Ctrl+s};
Go to line 1..50 = {Ctrl+g} $1 {Enter};
delete line 1..50 ={Ctrl+g} $1 {Enter} {Ctrl+y};
indent = {Tab};
unindent = {Shift+Tab};

Dragon/speech friendly Notepad replacement for voice coders

If you’ve tried to code by voice, you’ve likely realized that there are no compilers that support select and say. (If you found one, tell me, please.) Therefore, you dictate the code into Notepad, then copy and paste it into a compiler such as Visual C++, then try to compile and run it. The rub comes if Visual C++ turns up errors. It will helpfully give you the line numbers, and you may even be able to tell Dragon to go down the number of lines. The problem is that Visual C++ is MISERABLE when it comes to selecting and correcting text, and even dictating. Therefore, you have to go back to the original code in Notepad, find the errors there, fix them in Notepad, copy the document, go back into Visual C++, delete the code there, and paste the new code.

The problem with Notepad is that it doesn’t display line numbers; you have to count down the lines yourself. If you have a fair amount of code, your eyes may trick you and you might skip lines, making it rather tedious. But I found a program that might make it a little easier to dictate and vocally edit code. It’s the one Notepad replacement program out of I don’t know how many I tried that actually supports select and say: Win32Pad by Gennady Feldman. Even better, it has line numbering.

The line numbering is not turned on by default. It’s under View — Line Numbers. (The menus are vocally accessible as well. There are also keyboard shortcuts for most major functions.) Once you have turned on line numbering, it becomes easier to tell Dragon to go down or up some number of lines to find your error and correct it. Dragon’s own “go to line” command doesn’t work, but Win32Pad has its own shortcut, which you can access by saying “Edit,”then “go to line,” then saying the line number and OK. You could also tell Dragon to press Control G.

SDK: How to make a Dragon/speech recognition compatible program

In the recent brouhaha over Microsoft’s Word lawsuit, I couldn’t help wondering what would happen if Word really did disappear. That’s a longshot, but all the same… what would users of speech recognition be left with, besides WordPad? For once I’m not talking about tinkering or forcing things to work. I mean something that comes with select and say capability and vocally accessible menus — a program with a little more forethought. So…

Jarte Plus. One program. It’s a decent program, and it’s current and cheap — $19. But come on. Over the course of my experiments, I must have rejected at least 50 text editors and word processors because they just didn’t bother. Are you telling me that only one company is aware of speech recognition users enough that they KNEW that we’d be trying it out? Seriously, check the Jarte help site. There is a setting file in Jarte Plus specifically called Detect DNS. DNS does actually stand for Dragon NaturallySpeaking. (The issue mentioned in the help site doesn’t seem to apply to the Plus version, so no worries.) Carolina Road Software knew that basing something on Microsoft’s code would make it accessible to a broad variety of assistive technology, even if they weren’t users themselves. You can bet I sent a thank you note.

I really don’t understand the lack, though. Is it that people who go to school for programming aren’t taught about accessibility issues in their classes? Or is it that they think it’s too much work? Or do they not understand that it is NOT 100% the assistive technology programmer’s job, that they actually have to work together? Or is it just that they haven’t heard of SAPI or speech recognition soon enough? Or do they just figure that some other programmer will do it, and it’s not their problem? I don’t know.

There is help for the 2nd question though. On their development website, Microsoft has an overview of SAPI for speech recognition. Microsoft also has an SDK — a developer’s kit that actually has samples and instructions on how to make programs accessible to speech recognition. What a concept! There’s even a simple word processing program as an example, called Dictation Pad — the Windows equivalent of DragonPad, I guess. You use that as a springboard to your own applications, so that you know what you’re doing. Part of the work has already been done for you. So why aren’t more programmers making use of SDK? I don’t understand that either. This is why I wish that my study of C++ programming didn’t occur in such fits and starts, or I’d do it myself. But I’m nowhere near that point yet and don’t know if I ever will be. Dammit.

PS — once again, I’m not making light of the work involved in programming. I just don’t understand why programmers aren’t availing themselves of things that would help them to understand accessibility…if lack of understanding is indeed the problem.

Vocola commands for Tetris

These commands apply to the version of Tetris I mentioned in my previous post.

# Voice commands for tetris

New game = {F2};

flip (left = {NumKey8} | right = {NumKey5}) 1..4 = $1_$2;

drop = {NumKey2};

(pause | resume) = {F3};