Mandy de la Mare's J-Say Story

I have been using J-Say technology for nearly a year now, after extensively trying out many products, that links Dragon NaturallySpeaking products, to a screen reader for the Blind, or dyslexic people that use a screen reader to enable them to read text.

I am one of the 450+ Thalidomide’s, which was born in the late 50s and early 60s. I was born without any arms, blind in my left eye, and partially sighted in my right eye. I suffered a detached retina in my right eye in March 1979, and due to the nature of the damage to my right eye, I kept suffering detached retinas, until eventually they were not able to put my retina back on, which led to me losing my eyesight totally in 1996.

J-Say, is the first stable product that I have used with Dragon Professional version 8.1, and it enables me to use Dragon just like a sighted person, but with the added bonus of the screen reader, which gives the feedback, on the text that I dictate. Also the screen reader is able to read out, the choices in the correction box, read back the selected text, which you have asked Dragon to select.

I use my computer every day, as I am a volunteer visitor for the Thalidomide Trust, which means that I have to write lengthy reports, send e-mails back and forwards to the trust office, and other volunteer visitors, and beneficiaries that I may be helping.

Before I discovered speech recognition software, I typed using a QWERTY keyboard with my toes, which I was fairly fast at, but because keyboards are designed for fingers, and toes are fatter than fingers, I was prone to press more than one key, which slowed me down as I had to stop to make corrections, so when I saw a demonstration of speech recognition software, I could see that it was the answer to my problems, but because I was blind, I needed something to make speech recognition software compatible with my screen reader. I tried out many products, which seemed to work all right with my screen reader, but when they went wrong, it was difficult to repair the software that links the screen reader to speech recognition software, and usually in the end, it meant that somebody from the company that made the special piece of software, would have to come out and reinstall the software, and most of the time reinstall Dragon, as the special piece of software had corrupted Dragon files, so for a large part of my time, I was unable to use the speech recognition software, which meant that I had to revert back to using my toes, which was very frustrating, as I could type much quicker dictating straight to my computer. Eventually this situation became impossible, so we started looking round at alternative pieces of software, that would link my screen reader to speech recognition software.

I was given a demonstration of J-Say in June 2006, and I was so impressed with all that it could do, that the Thalidomide Trust, arranged to purchase a copy of J-Say, along with three days of training, so that I would be given a good start on how to use J-Say. My training started in August 2006, with Brian Hartgen and Phil Swift from TandT Consultancy, coming along to my house, installing JAWS 7.0, and J-Say, along with a few special features that I had requested, e.g. being able to store an address from my contacts, and giving a command in word that would bring it up in my document. Also being able to create directories, to make it easier to save a document into a particular directory, and then being able to call that directory up in Outlook when I want to add an attachment to an e-mail from that directory.

As I said at the beginning of this document, J-Say has been the most reliable piece of software, which I have used so far. I have been using it constantly since it was installed in August last year, and in that time it hasn’t let me down once, even when I have been doing demonstrations, which means that I have to pack up my lap top, and so far every time when I have rebooted it at a demonstration, it has worked perfectly and impressed everybody.

Because JAWS and J-Say worked so well together, I have been able to use the Internet much more, and for the first time last year, I did most of my Christmas shopping online on my own.

My own thoughts on J-Say technology, is that it is a good product, and because the people who design J-Say are totally blind themselves and really have an insight into how frustrating it is, if the piece of software that links the screen reader to the speech recognition software, not only takes down the speech recognition software when it dies, but takes down your screen reader, you as a blind user are totally stuffed! So with all that in mind, I feel that T&T Consultancy have made J-Say a very reliable product, and as far as they can, have made it easy for a blind person to use it, and if it was ever necessary to reinstall J-Say, a blind person should be able to do it on their own.