How Well does Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice-activated software work with Firefox? Just picking This thread back up in the context of accessibility debates.
Here is one of the more recent threads on Dragon and Firefox. And here is some of my thinking on compatibility, that I put in another thread.
The main concern seems to be that for some people, Dragon doesn't work with Firefox. Indeed Nuance, the people who make Dragon, say that they no longer do support for Firefox. My own experience is that Dragon (I use Dragon 16 professional) continues to work with Firefox – I'm using it to type this message now. I have not tried to install the Dragon extension that I used to use, and it still works. I have no idea why, but it does. In fact, I still find Dragon works better with Firefox than with any other browser, personally, Even though it's not supported.
I think Firefox deserves some credit here, because it seems that Nuance now does literally nothing to make the most widely known voice-activated software program compatible. at the risk of being greedy, though, I wonder if it would be possible to make it fully compatible? This might be, because as far as I can see, Dragon doesn't do all the things on any browser that you can do with it on, for instance, Microsoft Word – that's where you see its full functionality. But the things that are missing/ could work better, and that make the biggest difference to actually using Dragon as it is designed to be used, are as follows:
- it used to be possible, but no longer is, to use the "correct", "select" and related tools that allow you To edit text without using a keyboard or a mouse. For instance, in Microsoft Word, I could say "select paragraph", and the paragraph I'm currently writing would be selected, so that you could use editing tools like bold, italics, underline et cetera. If you say "select paragraph" when using Firefox – or any other browser, as far as I can see – Dragon says "cannot see any matching text". Reinstating this functionality would far and away make Firefox the best browser for Dragon.
- Making the "click X" function work every time. For instance, I use Moodle as a teacher. There is an announcements forum for students, which has a button on it which says "post". Sometimes, when I tell Dragon, "click post", it works, but sometimes it doesn't. There are many other examples of this.
I doubt, from my own experience with them, that Nuance would engage very constructively with Firefox accessibility team or developers in relation to making this happen, given that they seem to have abandoned trying to support Firefox. But is it worth Reaching out to them anyway? If they don't want to engage, are things that could be done simply from the Firefox side to improve compatibility?
wishing you well,
Andy
