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Re: Dragon versions and meeting accessibility guidelines

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From: Steve Green
Date: Jun 6, 2022 12:47AM


There are medical and legal versions of Dragon, but they cost a lot more than the Professional version. I have not used them, but I expect they have the special databases that you refer to.

We use Dragon Professional Individual for our testing, and I expect most other companies do. Dragon Professional Individual is cheaper, but I can't remember why we don't use it. They also have a product called Dragon Anywhere, but this is just for recording, and it does not do voice recognition.

One of the annoying things about Dragon Professional Individual is that it doesn't work with Microsoft Edge because it only goes up to version 15.6.1. Dragon Professional Group can be upgraded to 15.7.1 and does work with Edge, but of course it costs a lot more. This appears to be a totally cynical decision by Nuance.

Note that Nuance regard Dragon as a productivity tool, not an assistive technology, and they refuse to fix important bugs that have been in the product for many years. ARIA support is limited and Dragon doesn't recognise some form controls, such as number and date inputs. It's also worth noting that the vast majority of Dragon users only use it for dictation. Very few use it for web browsing, and even fewer use it to fill in web forms.

WCAG conformance makes pretty much no difference to Dragon. You might think that WCAG SC 2.5.3 (Label in Name) would be important, but for input elements Dragon responds to the visible text label, the accessible name and the "name" attribute. Very few other success criteria matter, but it is important that links and buttons have the correct role. Features such as "click link", "click button" and "mousegrid" enable interaction when elements have no visible label or are coded completely wrongly. Hover events can be difficult to trigger, but it is not necessarily impossible. Even drag and drop is sometimes possible, but it's painful.

Microsoft are in the process of buying Nuance, and it's a measure of how unpopular Nuance is that most people think that a Microsoft takeover would be a very good thing.

Regards,
Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd
020 3002 4176 (direct)
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07957 246 276 (mobile)
020 7692 5517 (fax)
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Connect to me on LinkedIn - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/stevegreen2


-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of jp Jamous
Sent: 04 June 2022 02:22
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: [WebAIM] Dragon versions and meeting accessibility guidelines

Hi folks,

I admit that my Dragon knowledge is not the best. I have been trying to read up on the Nuance site about the various Dragon versions, but I couldn't identify which version works best for navigating web pages and Windows applications.

I found Dragon Professional to be a Speech to text product that does not have any special databases like medical or legal. Does that professional version allow people with motor disabilities to navigate Windows, Windows applications and web pages? Of course, all of those user interfaces must comply with WCAG or Dragon would not be able to access their user interfaces.

Any knowledge you provide will be greatly appreciated.