WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Dragon versions and meeting accessibility guidelines

for

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)
0800 612 2780 (switchboard)
07957 246 276 (mobile)
020 7692 5517 (fax)
Skype: testpartners
<EMAIL REMOVED>
www.testpartners.co.uk
 
Connect to me on LinkedIn - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/stevegreen2