How to type without using your fingers!

Speech recognition is a very important tool for people who have a physical disability, and cannot use their fingers properly on a PC or laptop.

This simple article is an example of what can be achieved using the common commands in speech recognition which are available to people in this situation.

If you have windows 7 or higher, this updated programme is available to help you.

I suffer from a pinched nerve in my upper spine which makes using a keyboard nearly impossible these days.

Since I have to spend many hours writing and editing every day, it became vital that I found an alternative method of doing these tasks without using my right hand.

To achieve this, I discovered in my control panel a programme called ‘Ease of Access Center’ (Win 7).

All I needed then was a microphone connected to my PC, laptop. From there, the instructions were straight forward. You can do the same. All you have to do is go to your control panel, click on ‘ease of access’, and then ‘speech recognition’. It will ask you to start voice recognition, and set up a microphone.

There is a speech tutorial which I recommend you look at first, then, there is a section titled –training your computer to understand you, followed by – open the speech reference card. This allows you to view and print a list of common commands so you always know what to say.

This is a list of common commands in speech recognition which you can print out and which will give you the ability to control the various commands needed to complete a written article.

Yes, it takes some practice, and it can be very frustrating, you may find that sometimes the word which you have spoken appears incorrectly in your document, but this is easily changed by saying ’spell’. However, once you get the hang of it, your disability will vanish and you can create any document using this program.

Simple tasks such as inserting a comma, semicolon, colon, apostrophe, etc are a little bit more difficult, but if you follow the instructions, these grammar basics will also become easy to master.

The trick is to practice and get the computer used to your voice.

Everything that can be done on a keyboard using your fingers can be replicated via speech recognition.

To produce this written document has taken me hours of practice. My next goal is to attempt to edit an article.

Your disability should not stop you from writing.

Learn to use the tools that are available on your computer/laptop and get your message across. .

This article was produced using Microsoft ‘Ease of Access Centre’

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