Way back, when Macintosh was the only mass market computer with a sound card of acceptable quality and a 68030 processor with a memory map system that could address something like a large neural net, it was the only place that the then fledgling Dragon could bring it - of course, accessibility API, even MSAA, were still well in the future, so the program was designed for users without a disability. When they decided to port to Windows to catch the large market share, they did so with lots of owner drawn windows so the look and feel was the same on all platforms. Non-standard, owner drawn windows cause more application inaccessibility than anything else so, it worked poorly with JAWS on Windows and with anything on the Mac.
Dragon got acquired by SpeechWorks which, in turn, acquired a few other companies and changed its name to Nuance. Somewhere in there, they dropped the Mac version. The MacSpeach guys worked out a license with Nuance and tried to bring it back to Mac but did so keeping the owner drawn, inaccessible, UI elements. I'm really busy on a lot of different projects and hope to take a vacation in December (South Beach for Christmas) but I do hope to take a look at what MacSpeach provides through AppleScript and see if it isn't possible to force accessibility upon it. The Windows version has a really serious scripting functionality set that Brian Hartgen takes full advantage of in jSay. If it's as good on Mac, (no guarantee as it is in the hands of a different company altogether) it will be a pretty hard project but definitely doable. cdh On Nov 7, 2009, at 3:55 PM, .dan. wrote: > > > Someone shared: > >> MacSpeach Dictate is an odd program in that it is actually a licensed >> version of Dragon ported over to the Mac. > > Me: > > Interesting enough it started life only on a mac. I first saw it > demonstrated on a mac about 1995. There were plans at that time to > port it > to windows. > > It failed to make one of those u turns apple did with the mac > operating > system after being ported. The company by then had enough customers > not to > bother with the mac jyrations. > > XB > IC|XC > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
