Dragon NaturallySpeaking (and Yahoo Mail) hacks
We’ve got Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional at home and we spent a few happy minutes last night (well, frustrating minutes followed by happy minutes) setting up some macros for Anna.
The problem is that DNS doesn’t work terribly well for applications outside its immediate target set — that is, for much other than Microsoft Office 2000 you can dictate text but not really control the application. As I’m a stern opponent of Outlook and Internet Explorer we really needed it to work with Firefox and Yahoo Mail.
But Professional comes with some fairly sophisticated macro facilities, so we set about using these. Yahoo Mail has keyboard shortcuts for “check mail” and “compose mail” and so it was easy to use the “Send keystrokes” facility to automate these. Similarly you can send keystrokes for “File - Exit” which DNS ordinarily wouldn’t be able to act on in Firefox.
The hacks came when we wanted to automate clicking, say, the Send key which has no keyboard shortcut. We ended up with the following sequence: Send Ctrl+L (go to location bar); Enter text “javascript:void(…)” (my first ever bookmarklet(!) which instructed Firefox to find and click the Send button); Send the Enter key (complete the bookmarklet). It’s an awkward hack, but seems to work.
There’s potential to automate much more, of course. The Professional version is breathtakingly expensive, but it’s reassuring we’re finally making use of the features which aren’t in the lower-end versions.
It’s possible that at some point we’ll even get on to using its VBScript support, but I’m not a VBScript person. I think I’ll start at this Microsoft VBScripting page, and the Windows Scripting Host looks useful along with its SendKeys method…
