RE: [UACCESS-L] using naturalpoint and dragon naturally speaking?

["Robert Carnegie" <Robert.Carnegie@seemis.gov.uk>]

-----Original Message-----
From: uaccess-l-admin@trace.wisc.edu
[mailto:uaccess-l-admin@trace.wisc.edu] On Behalf Of Jennison Mark
Asuncion
Sent: 08 April 2009 04:26
To: Equal Access to Software & Information; uaccess-l@trace.wisc.edu
Subject: [UACCESS-L] using naturalpoint and dragon naturally speaking?

Hello,

Posing this on behalf of a non-list subscriber.  Their question follows.

"I use Natural Point to guide my mouse. What I
> need is a way to use Natural Point and Dragon
> NaturallySpeaking together in order to highlight
> text. I need to drag with Natural Point and use
> "click" commands with Dragon
> NaturallySpeaking.But Dragon NaturallySpeaking
> does not support Natural Point so whenever I use
> Natural Point to drag the mouse, Dragon
> NaturallySpeaking's features refuse to let me
> highlight the text. I wonder if there is a way
> to write a macro of some sort to bring the two programs together"?

Does this refer to the NaturalPoint SmartNAV pointer control and (not in
this case) onscreen keyboard?  And to Microsoft Windows?  (I think
there's a Mac version.)

I'll assume that it isn't a stupid question with an obvious answer, and
I'll go along with not bringing the issue to either product's
manufacturer or vendor - so I'm assuming that you've looked at their web
site "Frequently Asked Questions" and support articles already.

I'm going to guess that the exercise is to highlight text and then
operate on the highlighted text, for instance with the context menu.  As
far as I can see, SmartNAV on its own allows a complete drag operation,
which should be practically indistinguishable from using a real mouse.
But if you want to (and can) tell NaturallySpeaking to select down to
the word "eggplant", that could be a different problem.

Also, some Windows products that I recently got upgrades for have
changed their behaviour for operations on selected text, from
"Right-click (secondary or context click) anywhere on the screen" to
"Right-click inside the selected text or it will simply un-select".  So
that could demand attention to that requirement, or perhaps a version
upgrade of NaturallySpeaking to stay compatible.

Is there a NaturallySpeaking command for the context menu keyboard key?
Or is it provided in the NaturalPoint SmartNAV on-screen keyboard?

I use AutoHotkey, free download at <http://www.autohotkey.com>, for
Windows macro tasks, keyboard, mouse, other tricks.  One way to use it
here would be to place a small icon in the Windows "Quick Start" toolbar
that merely "presses the key" for context menu, without involving
NaturallySpeaking at that point.

A more sophisticated effort would be an icon to perform a specific
operation on selected text, or even watch the progress of the drag
operation and perform an operation when input is idle, i.e. when you
stop moving the pointer.

I am not sure if you can select a word in a document and then have
AutoHotkey detect the screen coordinates of the selection and use them
in another process.  That is the kind of funky thing that it can do.  

AutoHotkey is focussed on being resident and substituting keystrokes;
for instance when you type "gop"  it can change it automatically to
"Republican".  But it can do these other things - it is just a little
harder to find them in the instructions...  However, I doubt it can
respond to speech directly, only to keys - unless NaturallySpeaking or
another speech input product can generate a "realistic" key press, or
execute an external program on command.  In that case, macros could
substantially extend the capabilities of the speech input product.

Writing an AutoHotkey script to detect when you're trying to do an
operation, and help automatically, may be more difficult than setting up
an icon to run a process on command.  There are the "slam pointer
against the left/right/top/bottom screen edge" actions that it could
recognise, but they're usually already taken for something else.

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