yesterday's Dragon discovery, and today's

[julesjones]

I'm still working my way through the manual.Yesterday's discovery -- that saying "mouse click" does exactly that. Now, if you can more or less shove the mouse around the mat but clicking it hurts, this is extremely useful all by itself. But mention was made of the Mouse Grid. I left that for today. This command does indeed lay a 3 x 3 grid over the screen, you pick the numbered cell that you want, and a smaller grid pops up in that cell, with the mouse pointer in the centre. You can repeat this several times, and use the "mouse click" command as soon as you get the mouse pointer where you need it on the screen. This can be unbelievably tedious, but is also very useful when the verbal commands for selecting links fail you. I could have done with knowing about this a week ago, when even pushing the mouse around hurt.

And yes, there is a command for right clicking, and you can instruct it to press specific keys on the keypad. Of course, its recognition of individual letters isn't always that wonderful, but it does recognise the alpha bravo codes, which I am going to have to relearn.

And this little lot took me over 10 minutes to dictate. This is one of the reasons why it's not terribly practical for writing a novel with, at least for me. I await with interest Charlie Stross's report on his experiment with dictating to his iPad. (And I didn't have to spell out Charlie's name. Any of it.)

Comments

[zeborah]

I found the mouse grid hopelessly tedious. Moving the mouse around with directional commands (I forget the commands now, possibly "Move the mouse to the left. Faster. Faster. Stop.") was slightly less clunky but not much.

With letters I have to rely completely on alpha bravo, which is a nuisance because I don't know large important swathes of the alphabet.

[(Anonymous)]

That's interesting. I had no idea the mouse grid actually existed, but it seemed like an obvious approach to take.

[(Anonymous)]

Khiem, btw. Must have clicked on the dreamwidth link by mistake...

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

Sounds confusing, but you seem to be getting the hang of it...

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I'm finding this all very interesting because I have (perhaps foolishly?) volunteered to see if I can help a chap with disabilities who has been given a computer with Dragon. My use of the software is limited solely to dictating text, so even just knowing the sorts of things it can do is very helpful.

[julesjones]

That's partly why I'm blogging my relearning experience with it. Firstly, it both reinforces what I'm learning and acts as a quick reference for me of what I found useful, and secondly, I know other people who use Dragon at least intermittently in the same way that I usually do -- to dictate text and to switch between Windows, whilst still using the mouse and keyboard quite a lot. There are actually some quite powerful facilities in it that low-level users will never get around to, because it's too much of a bugger to learn them if being able to dictate text is enough to get by on.