277103 - Need support for Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice editing API

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Disability Access, enhancement)

Description

[Jonathan Sachs]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8a6) Gecko/20050103 Firefox/1.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8a6) Gecko/20050103 Firefox/1.0+

Many users whose ability to use a keyboard is limited by carpal tunnel syndrome
or other disabilities depend on speech recognition software to interact with
their computers. The dominant application in this field is Dragon
NaturallySpeaking, published by ScanSoft.

NaturallySpeaking provides an API which Dragon-aware applications can use to
edit text by voice. For example, if I were able to use voice editing on this
message I could put the cursor after the words "dominant application" right now
by saying, "insert after dominant application." Without voice anything I must
resort to commands like "move up seven lines... move left three words... select
next two words." Voice editing support yields something like an order of
magnitude improvement in working efficiency.

ScanSoft provides its own API support for several Microsoft applications, but
its support for Internet Explorer only seems to cover Web navigation features.
There is no voice editing support for editing text in a text box. At present, I
am not aware of any Web browsers that support voice editing. 

Please contact ScanSoft and find out what you need to do to support voice
editing through their API.

Navigation support is also important for users who are completely unable to use
a keyboard and mouse. The support that ScanSoft provides for Internet Explorer
provides a useful model, but should not be imitated -- it is too easy to
activate unintentionally, and seems to be impossible to turn off once turned on.
(I have never used it intentionally, so I cannot comment on its usability. Many
of ScanSoft's built-in APIs are lacking in this area.)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
n/a

Actual Results:  
n/a

Expected Results:  
n/a

Comment 1

[Aaron Leventhal]

My current understanding is that we have a choice to implement Microsoft SAPI or
the Dragon APIs. I'm still unclear as to what kind of implementation is
required, where we need to hook it in, and whether it needs to be part of the
Mozilla source code.

Does anyone have a contact at Dragon so we can ask some basic questions?

Comment 2

[Brian Vancil]

If no one knows anyone, you will probably have to go through their sales department.

http://www.scansoft.com/help/contact/sales/contactreqmain.asp

Maybe an official Mozilla inquiry would get somewhere.  Support for MSAA would
go a long way to making Firefox more usable with NaturallySpeaking.

Comment 3

[David Bolter [:davidb] (NeedInfo me for attention)]

Mass un-assigning bugs assigned to Aaron.

Comment 4

[william_r_s]

New information: the new version of dragon (version 12) includes a firefox addon that provides some accessibility (select and say, navigation) to certain webpages (hotmail and gmail I believe). So it looks like the Dragon team is trying to do something about this, but maybe they could use help from someone inside Mozilla?

Also, some more information about how this works:
http://nuance.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3765/~/enabling-full-select-and-say-capability-in-other-applications-for-dragon
http://supportcontent.nuance.com/kbfiles/5176-wp_WinAppsCompatWithDNS_807.pdf