alvca, thanks for the response.
On the topic of Dragon for Mac being discontinued, I have emailed Tim Cook, Craig Federighi, and contacted Apple Accessibility department. Not understanding what we can do with Dragon for Mac they suggested I try switch control. I'm highly productive with Dragon for Mac (not as much as I could be if Dragon for Mac had as much attention as Dragon for Windows). I would not be that way with switch control. I was so frustrated with Apple Accessibility not understanding the difference between switch control and a continuous speech recognition product I created a video of myself dictating my response to them using Dragon for Mac. I essentially dictated a 270 word response in less than 6 minutes which works out to roughly 45 words per minute. Try doing that with switch control.
Like I mentioned earlier Apple has continuous speech recognition built into macOS. The built-in dictation software just needs to add a few more features to be able to meet or surpass Dragon for Mac. I feel macOS built-in speech recognition needs at a minimum:
- Support for custom words, i.e., I need to add the words I use on a regular basis that do not come in the default vocabulary.
- Support speaker dependent continuous speech recognition, i.e., the speech recognition engine needs to be able to improve accuracy by learning from corrections.
- Support Speakable menus. When Dragon for Mac added this feature I could suddenly traverse menus by voice and I did not have to add custom commands. This was huge.
- Support positioning of the cursor. Dragon for Mac has MouseGrid. MacOS built-in speech needs something similar if not license the patent from Nuance.
- Support pressing and holding the mouse button so you can drag things around.
I have been racking my brain on how to get more visibility for this issue. I think making the video helped Apple Accessibility to better understand how productive someone with physical disabilities can be with the right tool. I'm thinking about possibly creating a YouTube channel and posting more videos of myself using my Mac via Dragon completely hands-free in the hope it will get some attention from Apple, or some other entity that wants to buy Dragon for Mac from nuance and continue to move it forward.
I do agree that everyone that has a disability that relies on Dragon for Mac needs to contact Apple Accessibility and let them know how important the software is to their everyday life. Only with enough demand will Apple get interested in doing anything about it.
