On Feb 8, 2006, at 11:02 PM, Brian Astill wrote:
Greetings, all.
Can anyone help with this issue?
Person with deteriorating vision has discovered Dragon
Naturally Speaking which not only allows the construction of text
from speech but can also speak from received text. ie letter writing
and email conversing etc become possible for the visually impaired.
All of which is wonderful except - you guessed it - the [EMAIL PROTECTED]&
program runs on Windows 2000/XP only. Why would anyone in their
right mind NOT port a program as sensible as this to a SECURE OS?
Not being a wise-ass here, but...
1) discourage saying your passwords out loud?
2) Unix is traditionally a server operating system, not targeted to end
users, so applications like Dragon Naturally Speaking isn't top
priority?
3) Most applications in Linux/FBSD are created to "scratch an itch";
the reason people now face usability problems is because most apps are
written by and for people who are technically minded and/or
programmers. I would guess that there aren't too many visually
impaired programmers active in the field, or that the current crop of
speech translators have trouble with translating programming language
to text.
4) You can't port a program you don't have the source to. Dragon
sounds proprietary, and the algorithms they use for transforming sound
to text are probably considered proprietary. To make a "clone" would
mean working from scratch. We're lucky sound OUTPUT is getting to a
level where it almost works among applications without a ton of
fiddling...let alone getting input translated properly to text.
Those are just my ideas of why someone in their right mind wouldn't
bother with the port off the top of my head. If the visually impaired
are a minority and there aren't many programmers in that minority, it
may take a long time to scratch that itch unless you are willing to
offer some kind of open-source bounty and pay for said program to be
developed. Windows programs are more often than not proprietary and
profit driven as an incentive to get a product like Dragon to market.
Linux/FBSD is driven by whims and itches of programmers and techies...
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