Dragon 9 Preferred and Firefox
Here are a few comments on my experience with Dragon 9 preferred (which I've been trying out for a couple of days) and how it works with Firefox.
Nuance advertises that Dragon 9 supports Firefox. I have found some definite improvement from Dragon 8 and Firefox. However, if you click on the help menu item in Dragon, and then click on the "help" topics, there is a list of commands given for both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox that are supposed to work for both Some of them do work with Mozilla Firefox (and with IE), but a few did not work in Firefox (at least as for me).
For example, all of the following Natural Language Commands now seem to work with Firefox: (1) "go to address bar," or alternatively, "go to address"; (2)"go," or alternatively "go there" in response to item 1 above, to get you to the address in question, (3) "refresh" or "reload"; (4), saying most of the menu items, such as the "help" menu item ("click help" also works), "tools," (or "click tools") "scrapbook," (or "click scrapbook), "bookmarks" or "click bookmraks," etc. (though if you say "bookmarks," or "click bookmarks," the side bookmarks panel opens). If you don't want to take up space with the side panel, just say, press press Alt B (making use of the keyboard shortcut), and the Bookmarks menu item opens out, from the top of the browser window. And on and on.
You can also use Natural Language commands like, for example, "go back," "go forward,", "page up," "page down," "go to top," "go to bottom," "line up," "line down," "go home," etc.
A nice feature with Dragon 9 and Firefox (not mentioned in the help tips is that you can say the name of a folder if it's on your personal tool bar and it generally opens out. Then you can say the name of an item in that folder, and that generally opens it.(I discovered this one, as I didn't find it in the Dragon help tips). This capacity doesn't seem to work in Internet Explorer 7, beta 3 when I tested it there with the personal toolbar in that browser.
Now to the one item that disappointed me a bit in Firefox (with Dragon 9). I thought (based on my reading of the "help notes" that there would be an improved ability to open links in Firefox using Dragon 9, over what was there in Dragon 8. The help menu says that you can say, "click" and some text from a link, and the link will open. It says you can say, "click text link" and if there are multiple links, the number of that link will appear. Then presumably you just choose the number. These features do work in Internet Explorer (there I just say, "click link" and the numbers for each link come on). Or I can just say words from a link, and the link will be highlighted, with an arrow pointing to it. Then in IE, you just say, press enter, or the number next to the link, and it will open.
In Firefox, however, if you don't have a check in the box, "begin finding when you begin typing," (In the Tools/Options/Advanced menu), it seems near impossible to open links on the page by voice, other than moving your mouse cursor over the link, and saying, "mouse click." If you do have a check in that box, then navigation of links is reasonable, as it was with Dragon 8. All you need to do is say a word or words from the link, and that link will be highlighted (unless there are multiple links with the same word or words) (then just say a few more words so that you've described the link you want to open in a unique way). Then just say, "press enter," and you can open that link by keyboard. Thus, in navigating links (notwithstanding what appears to be overstated features for Firefox), you're pretty much where you were with Dragon 8, dependent on the check in the box, "begin finding when you begin typing." As long as you have the check in that box, speaking in Dragon some of the text in a link, gets the link highlighted, and helps you to open it. Also, if you have one of the "numbers" extensions (I have Mouseless Browsing.4), you can use Dragon in conjunction with it to put numbers on links, through a hotkey (for example, "press escape), and then open that link by stating the number. Of course, nothing has changed here with Dragon 9. The same ability was present with Dragon 8.
Now, if anyone else has a different experience, I'm interested in hearing about it.
An update: a few weeks
An update: a few weeks having passed. I thought I would provide some of my additional experiences/views regarding Dragon 9 preferred, and Firefox.
All told, I am extremely impressed with how easy it is to navigate the Web with Dragon 9, using Firefox. One thing I have noted is that if one says a word or a few words from a link, those words are highlighted (of course, it is critical that one has selected in Firefox the function, "begin finding when you begin typing". Once the words in the link are highlighted, then you just say, "press enter." At that point, the link will open. However, a lot of the times it isn't necessary to do that. If the link is relatively short, just say the entire link, and voilà, it will open automatically, without the need to say, "press enter." If the link is longer, you can still try to say all the words in the link, to escape, having to say, "press enter," but the problem is that if you mispronounce a word, your effort, to escape having to say, "press enter," will fail.
On the feature in Firefox where you can access items on your personal toolbar, by just saying the name of the item in the toolbar, it is important to select a name that works. The word you select for the personal toolbar item may even have to be relatively unique (if what you selected doesn't work). For example, for my folder, "News," on my Personal Toolbar, which contained a lot of links to newspapers, I found that when I said the word "news,", Firefox would sometimes/often not open that folder. I think the problem was that the word "news," often occurred elsewhere on the particular webpage I was on at the time, and the software was getting confused. So, therefore, I changed the name of the folder on my personal toolbar to, "Newsreports," and now I have no problem at all with Firefox opening that personal toolbar folder, when I say the word. It seems to do it without fail. Another item on the personal toolbar I was having a problem with was my folder, "health." The reason for the problem there was that on many webpages, there is a "health," link (eg. Cnn.com). Dragon became confused between which to open (the link on the CNN page, called "health," or my personal toolbar folder item called "health"), and would not open the link on the personal toolbar. So I changed the link on my personal toolbar to, "Health, Medicine," and now whenever I say those two words, Firefox will immediately open that personal toolbar folder.
In giving names to links within a folder, one must also be careful as to what one selects. One can experiment a little. Still, when all else fails, the alphabet or the phonetic alphabet does wonders, eg., press A, or press Alpha [for press A].
Many of the natural language commands work quite well with Dragon 9 and Firefox. Go back, go forward, go to top, go to bottom, homepage, page down, page up. Of course, one can still use all the keyboard shortcuts, "press backspace," "press frontspace, press home, press end" etc. Of course, there were a few caveats/kinks I mentioned here in my prior post.
All told, navigating with Dragon 9, and Firefox is a breeze/delight. One nit problem that I had was Firefox would at times -- horrors! -- stop functioning. Indeed, it was happening quite frequently when I'm had activated the extension, Mouseless Browsing 4.1 (which assigns numbers to links). I would highlight a number (using the Mouseless Browsing extension), say press enter, and suddenly (not all the time, but far too often) Firefox would go dead. No links would then work. I would have to close Firefox, and then open it again, to get it going. A nuisance, for sure. Now maybe there was a problem with my configuration/setup there. However, once I decided to disable that extension, and to simply navigate making use of Firefox's "Begin Finding When You Beginning Typing" capacity, the freezes almost entirely stopped. (Yes, I had one in several hours of browsing with Dragon the last two days (where Mousesless Browsing wasn't implicated): so infrequent as to no longer be a big deal). In other words, as long as you have that feature, "Begin Finding when you begin typing" selected in Firefox, navigating with Dragon 9 is as simple as just saying a few words from the link, or if the link is short, all the words in the link. In sum, I must say, Dragon 9 is a significant improvement over Dragon 8 (which, in another itself, was quite reasonable).
The main benefit I had for Mouseless Browsing was when a page was long, and one had to click on a number, like "2" to get to the rest of the article. With Mouseless Browsing, one could get a number next to the "2," (ex. 75) Then you just say that number ("75") and can open the link to the next page. Without Mouseless Browsing, one can say, "2" or "numero 2," but the problem is that the web page may be filled with 2s. It's therefore hard to get to the "2" that you need to have highlighted to open the link by voice command alone, so as to get to the next page of an article. I haven't solved that one yet, so then I cheat a bit, move the mouse cursor over the "2" I need to open, and say, "mouseclick." [Also, I don't know if using Mouseless Browsing 4.0, not 4.1 would make a difference, as I had been using 4.1 (which isn't the extension on the Mozilla page, but is an updated one I got from the developer's web page].
Now if Nuance would take a look at the Opera browser (also, like Firefox, an extremely fine browser) (different and unique in its own way) and enhance its capacities to operate with Dragon, I would tip my hat to Nuance, and say, "a thousand times, thank you!" Still, in terms of Firefox, all I can say is that the job Nuance did was, "well done."
lem729 wrote: Now if Nuance
Now if Nuance would take a look at the Opera browser (also, like Firefox, an extremely fine browser) (different and unique in its own way) and enhance its capacities to operate with Dragon, I would tip my hat to Nuance, and say, "a thousand times, thank you!" Still, in terms of Firefox, all I can say is that the job Nuance did was, "well done."
Since Opera has included their own voice capability, I wonder how hard it would be. I remember something about Opera not wanting to allow outsiders to link to their browser, but that was a LONG time ago!
Opera's own voice capability
Opera's own voice capability is extremely primitive. I would hope it would be able to recognize that, and to take steps necessary to make its browser operate better with third-party software that could be major accessibility plus for it. On this issue of allowing outsiders to link with it, I'm not sure that Nuance actually had to work with Mozilla in creating software to enhance Firefox. They probably were able to look at Firefox, and to develop voice activation software that worked with Firefox (without much if any coordination with Mozilla. Therefore, it is not out of the question that Nuance could at some point modify its program to work better with Opera (even without direct contact with Opera). Still Firefox is open source software, so maybe that would make a difference.
Now even without getting Nuance's help, Opera ought to function better with Dragon 9, through steps it could take. For starters, my subjective sense is that Opera 8.54 worked a lot better for me with Dragon 8 (which I owned), then Opera 9.01 works with Dragon 9. Indeed, I thought Opera 8.54's effectiveness with Dragon 8 was fairly close to Firefox's with Dragon 8. My analysis of the problem with Dragon 9 is as follows:
In Opera, one must type the comma from the keyboard to open the "link search box" in the lower left side of the browser (or with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, say, "press comma," and the link search box opens. Then you say the words from the link you want to open. Still, the box is open for such a short period of time, one at times can't get it done timely to highlight a link, and then to say, "press enter," to open it [keep in mind that Dragon 9 takes up more system resources than Dragon 8, so with limited RAM, one's computer may react a bit more slowly to commands]. Opera's link search function needs to be modified to permit the user to let the link search box be open for a longer period of time, permitting a more extended link search. (I believe with Opera 8.54, the comma, triggering the link search ONLY (as one began typing after the comma) searched for links on a page. Now the comma triggers a search through the entire page. So in a limited amount of time where the link search box is open, the search is less efficient. Because in the earlier version of Opera, the comma, triggered a search limited to words in links, it could find the links more easily, it would seem than it does now (where the search goes through every word on a web page).
And this is related to my second concern, i.e., the accuracy of the Opera link search. Sometimes a word is said correctly, because it appears in the link search box, but the word in the link itself (which appears in the box) IS NOT HIGHLIGHTED. Maybe, this is because the link search box is open for such a short period of time that the computer program/software can't find the word on the page (that's also in the link) in time. It's as if the link search mechanism has made an error. This seems to happen far more frequenly with Opera than with Firefox.
Anyway, even without Nuance working on Opera, Opera could: (1) let users choose to keep -- through an optional setting in preferences -- the link search box open longer (giving its software more time to search for links to highlight and open), (2) it could limit it's link search to links on the page; and (3) it could eliminate the need to type a comma (or say "press comma") in Dragon to start the link search, by coming up with a system somewhat like Firefox's where a user can simply select a "begin finding when you begin typing" feature, obviating the need for the comma as a trigger.
Opera works differently
Opera works differently enough that I'm only using it anymore to see how a web page looks in it. It does render a web page different from the other browsers at times. One has to ask which one is right!
Interesting observations though.
On Mouseless Browsing 4.1
On Mouseless Browsing 4.1 (the Firefox Extension), which I referred to in a prior post in this thread,the problem that I had with freezes of Firefox when using it has seemingly ended. At some point, I substituted a new Firefox profile for the old one, and that might have made the difference. Anyway, I enjoy using this extension with Dragon, and very very rarely now am getting freezes.
While I find that the "Begin Finding When You Begin Typing" feature is generally sufficient for purposes of using with Dragon 9, and gets very good voice activation responsiveness, there are times when the Mouseless Browsing extension can still be quite useful. First, for people who do not like typing, because they have trouble finding the letters on the keyboard, The Mouseless Browsing extension provides an easy alternative to accessing links. Also, with voice activation, there are times when a webpage is not ideal for the "Begin Finding When You Begin Typing" feature. For example, if you do a Google search, and the search word appears all over the page (maybe 20 times), it may be hard to use a word to identify a link, because the word appears in 10 links. With the Mouseless Browsing extension, each link gets a number. Then, all you have to do is say the number, to open the link. Also, if you're trying to open a link with a number, e.g., "7," in it, if you say the number, what may show up in the "Begin Finding When You Begin Typing" search box, is the word, "seven," instead of the number, "7." With the Mouselss Browsing extension, it's easy to open the link with the number.