As a professional programmer who also happens to be afflicted with spinal muscular atrophy (a severe neuromuscular disorder), PC accessibility is of paramount importance to me. Accessibility (or the lack of it) directly influences how efficiently I am able to work, which invariably influences my bottom line. More than that, it affects my state of mind. Being able to click that little red 'x' to close a window on your desktop may seem easy to most of you, but it can become quite tiresome or perhaps even be impossible to do for many users with disabilities. So when the world's most influential software maker introduces a new or updated accessibility feature, I take notice. And after test driving Windows Vista's speech recognition engine, it most certainly opened my eyes, er mouth! Why am I so excited? Well, for one, speech recognition has finally become a first-class citizen in Windows. Before Vista, speech recognition was never installed by default in Windows (and for go...
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