Hello Lyx Developers,
My name is Jodin, and I recently graduated with my doctorate in
mathematics. I have a disability which requires me to use voice
recognition to input mathematics into my computer. For the last 10
years or so, I have used three pieces of software (on Windows) to
accomplish this. However, recently two of these software packages
(Scientific Notebook and MathTalk) stopped being supported (the
underlying companies went out of business). As a result, I have been
looking for some other software I might be able to use. The voice
recognition software I use (the primary desktop voice recognition
software in existence) is Nuance Dragon Dictate. It was recently
purchased by Microsoft, so it is doubtful that this piece of software
will become unsupported anytime soon. However, there are no longer any
off-the-shelf software packages which translate the recognized words
into math, so I am interested in developing something along these
lines. In particular, I thought I might develop something around Lyx.
It's unfortunate that the voice technology allowing people with
disabilities to write mathematics has recently disappeared. I am hopeful
that Lyx can become the future provider of this capability.
I like Lyx because it is open source, and I wish to avoid relying on
another piece of software that is profit based, and might go out of
business someday. The idea is to create hundreds of scripts in Dragon
Dictate. That way, when I say "VarOmega," for example, Dragon Dictate
will turn my voice into words, recognize the words as a Dragon Dictate
Script, which can then choose from a pulldown menu on Lyx, or just enter
the right keystrokes.
The main barrier I face right now (other than the time it will take to
develop all of the scripts), is that many of the mathematical objects in
Lyx are not available either through a menubar or keystroke. So my
request to the developers would be to add keystroke accessibility to as
many mathematical objects as possible. To make things easier, these
keystrokes do not need to be documented in any way. You needn't add the
keystroke information on the user interface (for example, when you hover
your mouse over the button for the math object, or in the help
documentation). The point would not be to offer the average user a
quick keystroke. And to that end, the keystroke could be very obscure
(e.g., Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Meta+K), it doesn't need to be simple at all.
Doing this does not limit Dragon Dictate's ability to type the
keystroke, and simultaneously opens up a lot of keystrokes.
Regardless, I will start developing this the voice recognition capacity
with the keystrokes you currently have available, as I need it for my
own purposes. However, I believe developing this more comprehensively
is an important thing for the disability community. And I believe the
coding effort required is somewhat minimal.
--
Jodin
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