Just out of curiosity, is your uncle just blind, or does he have
mobility problems as well? If blindness is his only problem, there's
really no need to use voice commands to control the mac. It is neat,
and certainly can make things easier at times, but in general, it
just slows things down if it isn't necessary. If it is necessary,
then it's a wonderful thing for allowing disabled folks to use the
machine. In general though, it's really a novelty that folks that
are just blind don't really need, and in fact, if not using
headphones, voice over can get in the way of the speech recognition,
so in practice, I generally suggest that if voice recognition isn't
necessary for using the computer, thhat it be used only when other
methods are unwieldy or when just experimenting, as it's considerably
faster w/o it.
On Mar 6, 2006, at 3:00 PM, Peter Burgoyne wrote:
Hi, Im a sighted guy helping my blind uncle to get some use out of
his mac,
I went to the states and bought a copy of Ilisten for him, he
already has viavoice...
but weve found it has trouble dictating into anything other than
its own text editor,
weve just managed to have him read and dictate a mail back all with
his voice.
you guys seem to be doing ok... from reading these digest mails...
maybe weve missed all the really basic problems you guys would have
reported here...
but we are still pretty much at square one.
heres how we did it for your information.
ive set up Ilisten to start on login for my uncle.. and start in
command mode.. with the mic on..
(Ilisten is pretty much not blind centric... more for lazy sighted
people... so unfortunately ive had to help him with his set up.)
I've also set the mouse to track voiceovers cursor in the voiceover
settings.
say; open mail (mail opens)
say; tab (voiceover cursor moves from delete to search)
say; tab (voiceover cursor moves from search to message boxes)
say; tab (voiceover cursor moves from message boxes to message table
say; arrow up or arrow down (to select message header)
say; enter (to open selected message)
the selected message will open in a new window in front
say; tab (voiceover cursor moves from delete to reply)
say; click mouse (a new reply message window opens)
say; switch to dictation mode (the cursor should now be at the top
of the message text field)
you can then dictate your message
say; click mouse (the cursor and mouse are on send, the message
will be sent)
I really hope this helps some of you.
this is the sort of information my uncle would like to be reading
here.
as we crack on Ill post up more of our findings.
of course, Ive had to help my Uncle train his voice, by pausing the
training sessions and reading out the storys it asks you to read. I
can recommend doing this if you can.
If anyone else has any similar knowledge or can recount it in this
form we would be very grateful
or if anyone has any other methods, please post them if you can
in our limited experience Ilisten gives better allround performance
than viavoice.
best wishes and good luck,
Peter
p.s. maybe next time this will be posted without any sighted
assistance.
