Getting your computer to help

Computers can be great office helpers, but some find them difficult to use. Don’t worry, they can help with that too, as Simon Williams explains.

HardCopy Issue: 48 | Found In: Business | Published: 01/05/2010 | Last Revision: 06/07/2010

Computers have always been tools to help us work better by storing information and communicating it to others, but they can also help us to use them. If you find it difficult to type or to read, there are other ways of interacting with a PC. Many software and hardware products are available to assist with a range of learning difficulties and disabilities and many of these can be installed on off-the-shelf computers to turn them into machines that offer specialist assistance to the people using them. Here’s a range of what’s available to help everybody take advantage of computers.

Speech recognition

As well as being a useful tool for those who have few typing skills, speech recognition is ideal for those who have difficulties using a keyboard or mouse. This can be anybody who has RSI or related injuries, through to those with more serious physical disabilities. The best-known name in speech recognition is Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS), now owned by Nuance. This program recognises speech and converts it to text or commands in Windows. It can be used for dictation into Word and WordPerfect, Excel, Outlook and other popular applications. Documents, worksheets and emails can be created with minimal use of keyboard or mouse. Windows itself can also be controlled entirely by speech, so you can open and close applications, resize windows, select menu options and perform searches. The program can be used with Internet browsers, too, for research and information gathering, without any typing. Indeed this article was entirely dictated into DNS 10: the author has been using Dragon for a number of years, since a bout of very painful RSI forced him to think carefully about the amount of mouse work involved in his job. These days, very little training is required for the software to acclimatise itself to your voice and accuracy is high, so less time is required in making corrections. The program can be used with a wired headset, a Bluetooth headset, or an array microphone which sits on the desk with no physical attachment to the speaker. The Mobile version of the software comes with a digital recorder, so you can dictate on the move and convert the recorded voice files when you’re back with your computer. There are other advantages, too. Most people speak a lot faster than they can type, so they can produce text in a fraction of the time it would take if it all had to be done with the fingers. Typing errors are also impossible if you dictate, though to some extent they’re replaced by homonym errors, where the speech recognition software substitutes one word for another with the same sound.

Dragon Naturally Speaking makes speaking to your PC very practical.

Text-to-speech

Software which converts text on the screen to the spoken word is intended primarily for those with severe visual impairment. Text-to-speech applications can take text from word processor documents, Web pages or anything else displayed on-screen and read it aloud, but they can also be made to read menu choices and other application-based text, to assist in the use of those applications. If text-to-speech makes you think of Prof Stephen Hawking, you should know that speech from products like Kurzweil 1000 is more closely allied to that from the computer on the USS Voyager than to our leading theoretical physicist. You can select male or female voices with a range of national accents to suit your preference. Freedom Scientific’s JAWS screen reader does pretty much what it says, reading back selected text from anything shown on screen, but it can also intelligently read the text from a Windows dialogue and indicate which button is currently highlighted. Kurzweil 1000 takes text-to-speech further, by incorporating scanning software and a dedicated text editor. This means text can be imported from printed pages, magazines and books, increasing the sources of information available to those who find it hard or impossible to read them directly. Edited files can then be stored or sent to a braille output device or to dedicated readers such as DAISY. Azabat Write and Write+ are self-contained text editors for visually impaired or blind users. These are self-voiced, so needing no external text-to-speech software. The Write+ product includes the ability to send email and gives you a free email address on the Azabat server. These two programs are available on CD and USB drive and can be run directly from either, so you can take a speech-driven editor with you and use it on any available PC. Other titles, including a good selection of speech-enabled crosswords and games, are also available from Azabat.

Assisted reading/writing

For visual problems not severe enough to warrant text-to-speech, a screen magnifier can be a good solution. There is a magnifier built into Windows Vista and Windows 7 - as are rudimentary speech recognition and text-to-speech tools (check under All Programs, Accessories, Ease of Access). However ai squared’s ZoomText goes a lot further.

Hardware Assistance

There are lots of hardware devices available to assist those who find it difficult to use conventional keyboards and mice. The most obvious are alternatives to these two fundamental input devices.

Heavy use of a keyboard and mouse can result in Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI), carpal tunnel syndrome and other related injuries. Keyboards with a curve or split in them to align the keys more directly with the natural angle of the arms and hands can help. These are available from major brands, like Microsoft and Logitech, and from more specialist suppliers such as Goldtouch.

The Goldtouch keyboards have a double advantage. First, they have a locking ball joint between the two halves of the split keyboard, so can be adjusted for angle both horizontally and vertically. Second, they have no numeric pad or special keys to the right of the cursor arrows. This makes the keyboard narrower, so when using a mouse, your right arm doesn’t have to swing out, relieving strain on upper arm and elbow joint.

High contrast, large print keyboards are also available for those with impaired vision. One supplier is ai squared, whose ZoomText keyboard uses black text on yellow keytops and includes dedicated function keys to tie it into the ZoomText screen magnification software.

One of the key problems with mice, particularly if used for prolonged, precision work, is that they twist the lower arm anti-clockwise and require precise muscle control for small movements. Evoluent has developed a mouse which removes this twist, by being configured vertically. It’s held in the same orientation as when shaking hands with someone, with mouse buttons and click-wheel moved through 90 degrees. Right and left-hand versions are available.

With more extensive disabilities, hardware can be tailored to individual needs, but this specialist kit is normally designed and provided through local educational or medical services or disability charities – see reference links.

As well as being able to magnify any section of the screen, the program includes four useful visual enhancements. Your screen colour scheme can be selectively changed to provide higher contrast, the mouse pointer can be enlarged, coloured or turned into full-screen crosshairs, the text cursor can be given a circling ring to highlight it and a focus rectangle can be placed around menu options. One of the interesting features of ZoomText is that its xFont technology ensures characters stay clean and don’t pixelate as they’re magnified. ZoomText also includes a text-to-speech engine and can be combined with Dragon Naturally Speaking to provide a two-way speech interface. As well as Kurzweil Education System’s package for the visually impaired, Kurzweil 3000 aims to assist those with educational difficulties by providing text-to-speech with integrated dictionary. Even the spellchecker speaks each word as typing proceeds and voices any suggested corrections. Students can highlight any words or phrases they want, either to remind them to check definitions or to incorporate them from study texts into their own writing. The program offers a clever way to extract these highlighted elements and automatically creates an outline from them. For those who find it hard to organise their research, this easy outlining makes it much simpler to build a framework within which to write.

Mindjet’s MindManager is often thought of as a brainstorming and idea development tool for business, but it has application in education, too. MindManager’s tools for organising projects and study topics, helping you break down a large or complex subject into its component parts and related ideas, can be particularly helpful for those with use-of-language difficulties. The chance to organise a study program graphically, rather than being reliant on vocabulary, can make it easier for those with a strong visual sense to organise their work. The basic principles involved in creating a mind map can be applied to many areas of learning, from a study of pyramid building in South America to numerical methods of deriving integrals in physics or maths problems. Computers aren’t just useful tools for developing and recording ideas, they can provide assistance with their own use, too. By introducing the right software applications or targeted hardware, the advantages they offer can be made available to a much wider audience.