Marc of the Web

As a Windows developer, one of the most challenging (and fun) tasks I sometimes get to do is integrating multiple disparate applications so they can communicate with one another. Most of the time this involves blending a .NET application with an automation application and doing the regular COM interop one would expect. However, occasionally something more interesting comes along. One such occasion popped up recently for me, as I had to design and implement a solution to integrate our mainframe terminal emulation client with an intranet web application. The main goal of this particular project was to provide a way to pre-fill an existing web form application with data from a mainframe screen. Normally, the user would have to read the appropriate data from the mainframe screen, manually enter the data into the web form, submit the form, and return to the mainframe terminal and key in a simple log entry indicating that the process was complete. Obviously, due to the nature of jumping back...

As a software developer with a physical disability that makes using a keyboard practically impossible for me, one of the most important capabilities of speech recognition that I always look for is keyboard emulation.  And by keyboard emulation, I’m not talking about entering a bunch of common words and phrases like I’m doing while writing this article.  This is called dictation.  Rather, I’m referring strictly to the ability to key short (or not-so-short) sequences of characters and/or key combinations like myVariableName or myFile.doc .  Words like these aren’t easily understood by the built-in speech recognition dictation engine because they are not in any dictionaries I know of (nor should they be), so another speech recognition mechanism is needed.  This is called typing. Vista’s speech recognition tutorial and the what can I say Windows help documents suggest one good way to type single keyboard keys— Press X .  For example, you can say Press a to t...

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...