NVDA -Using when Windows Laptop is in tablet mode and using dragon Professional
David Lenton
Son is trying to use NVDA Version “2022.3.2”. He is also using Galaxy Book 2 Pro 360 with Windows 11 Home in tablet mode. That is without keyboard or mouse as he cannot use these. 1) In some programs the text entry boxes (Pycharm for example), won’t open the touch keyboard when you double tap the edit field. However, the touch keyboard will open and allow text entry into text field when we use the four finger swipe right gesture as found in the enhanced touch gestures addon. My son cannot perform a 4 finger gesture due to severe dexterity issues. So, can a more simple finger gesture using only 1 or 2 fingers be implemented instead. Can a similar or the same gesture be implemented to close the keyboard as well. 2) Does anyone have any experience with using Dragon professional, we want to know if you can ask it to perform commands involving the NVDA key. Windows Speech recognition cannot do this 3) Has anyone had any experience using Microsoft remote desk to control laptop from Android phone. |
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Tara Roys
To answer question #2: I do not have much experience using Dragon Professional, but I do have experience using Talon Voice Control, and Talon Voice Control can be adapted to press NVDA keyboard shortcuts on a Windows 10 system. I haven’t tested it on windows 11, but I assume that it would work since I haven't heard anybody on the talon forum complain about compatibility issues with windows 11. So let’s say I want to press the Nvda keyboard shortcut NVDA-ctrl-v to launch the NVDA settings menu with Talon: The way you convince Talon to press the NVDA key is (after you’ve got Talon all installed and set up) Write a line in a .talon file that looks like this: nevada settings: key(insert:down ctrl-v insert:up) What this does is when I say the command ‘Nevada settings’ it will hold down the insert key, press they keyboard shortcut ctrl-v, then release the insert key. I chose the word Nevada to mean ‘NVDA key’ but you could use almost word. Also, this command depends on you having set up NVDA so that the NVDA key is the ‘insert’ key. I haven’t tried to make a talon file using capslock as the Nvda key, so I don’t know if that would work. It is also *possible* to write a couple of more generic voice command so that you could say something like ‘Nevada control vest’ and it would press insert-ctrl-v’ or when you say ‘Nevada 1’ it would turn on the command help- but it would probably look something like nevada <user.modifiers> <user.unmodified_key>: key("insert:down {modifiers}-{unmodified_key} insert:up") nevada <user.unmodified_key>: key("insert:down {unmodified_key} insert:up") and at that point you would basically just speak your Nvda keyboard shortcuts out loud to the computer. ( I haven’t tested these yet, and the above it depends on having Talon installed with the default command set knausj-talon, which is recommended in both the official installation instructions and the windows installation video I made, linked at the end of this post.) A bit more about talon vs Dragon: The big advantage of using talon instead of dragon professional is that talon has a robust free version that is as good as dragon professional, and a paid version with tech support for $25/month is even better. Last time I looked, Dragon professional cost between $200 and $500, and there is every indication that dragon is a dying company based on how they keep jacking up the prices, dropping support, and not shipping any new features. Dragon is a pretty historically garbage company anyway because the the technical brains of the company were ousted and robbed of pretty much all their money and intellectual property, and so there isn’t really anybody inside Dragon that is doing research and development to make things better. That being said, Talon has the accessibility issues of terrible documentation. The difficulty with Talon is that unless you are already a programmer, you basically have to hire someone like me, or chaosparrot, or rntz, or Pokey, or andreas to help you get set up, because the set up is multi step, complex, and exceedingly detailed, and very frustrating to already-disabled people. On the other hand, if you are going to spend $500 to buy something like Dragon to kinda-sorta get something that only kinda sorta works, then hiring a Talon-knowledgeable developer for $500 to get *exactly* what you want and need is, in my opinion, a way better use of $500. The advantage of the setup being extremely detailed is that you can make Talon do exactly what you wanted to do. If you want Talon to press the backspace key when you whistle three times, Talon can be set up to do that. If you want talon to type out letters that you hiss at it in Morse code, Talon can be set up to do that. My hands have severe mobility issues, my eyes only work intermittently, and occasionally I lose the desire or sometimes even the ability to speak English words and default to making noises, , and talon has allowed me to wire the noises, words, sentences, keypresses, and (if I’m using a Mac) facial expressions to whatever commands I desire. This means I can still use a computer regardless of what is going on with my body that day. Dragon, on the other hand, is really only good at Dictation, and is pretty uniformly garbage at controlling your computer, and relies on other programs like Dragonfly to use voice commands to control your computer- and Dragonfly, even more than Talon, requires that you be a programmer to use it. Anyway, here’s a demo of me using Talon with NVDA, and here’s a link to my ‘how to install Talon’ video.
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Cyrille
Hi
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Regarding question #1: I cannot test personally because I do not have a touch capable device. But I guess the add-on author could add a description to the script in order to allow the user it to remap it via the Input gesture dialog. @Joseph, if you read this thread, could you do something. @David: If Joseph does not answer, you could write him directly to ask for this update of the add-on. Cheers, Cyrille On Tue, Dec 13, 2022 at 05:18 PM, Tara Roys wrote:
On Tue, Dec 13, 2022 at 05:18 PM, Tara Roys wrote:
On Tue, Dec 13, 2022 at 05:18 PM, Tara Roys wrote:
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Hi, As a workaround, the user can move to touch keyboard icon and do a double tap to activate it. I'll do something about this command - at least adding the input help message for it - in an upcoming release (as early as January 2023). Note that Enhanced Touch Gestures is in deep maintenance and am still looking for maintainers - I have no plans for feature additions at this time (input help message issue for touch kweyboard toggle is considered a bug and will be resolved as such). Cheers, Joseph |
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David Lenton
Thanks Joseph for your help. We can open the touch keyboard as you suggested but once its open, the text box you are editing in cannot always regain focus in many applications. It appears that in Notepad, it does work and when the keyboard is open you can tap inside notepad to get focus and then use the touch keyboard to enter text . However other application such as Pycharm this doesn't work, so tapping in the edit field has no effect in fact it seems as the application is almost disabled. I guess based on your explanation this maybe due to how some applications exchange status information with Windows and NDVA.
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David Lenton
Tara
Thanks for the information you provided to my initial query, so we are now installing talon and the scripts. I have two queries mid installation. 1) In your video the file you got from the green code button ended with master, however when I went there it ended with main (knausj_talon-main.zip). I followed the same link so not sure whey these are different. Also it appears you put the ZIP file in the user folder as a copied ZIP file rather than extracted files as I would have expected. Is that correct to use the ZIP or have I missed the extraction. I hope you might be able to help clarify these for me before I continue with the process and following your youtube video. Your help so far is very much appreciated. David |
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Tara Roys
The short version is that the repository has been renamed, and knausj-talon-master.zip and knausj-talon-main.zip are the same thing. And yes, the zip should be extracted into the talon user directory. Talon will not be able to use a compressed archive. Also, the next issue you will probably run into if you are using both NVDA and Talon at the same time is that NVDA speaks things out loud and Talon listens for voice commands. This is made worse by the fact that talon automatically starts listening for things on startup, and NVDA automatically starts talking, so if you are not using headphones, using both at once will result in a string of unpredictable commands being sent to your computer and it basically results in things like me wanting to smash my computer with a hammer out of frustration that it just spun wildly out of control. The simplest fix is to use headphones when using both. I have a variety of more complex fixes, developed because I can’t always wear headphones due to ear and head pain, but I doubt at this point you want to add more configuration to the already complex set of configurations your doing. so unless you’ve got some reason like excruciating ear pain that makes you avoid headphones, I would wear headphones. Wired ones, specifically, because Bluetooth headphones will result in even more configuration, which you can ask me about. Long possibly overly-detailed version of the above answer: Short version: ‘master’ and ‘main’ are the same thing. Main, however, does not carry the connotation of the ‘master/slave’ analogy that was popular as a networking analogy, or ‘master race’ terminology and nonsense a lot of pro-Nazi and pro-facist programmers like and a lot and use to prevent people they deem unworthy of existence from being safe and comfortable learning and using their software. https://www.theserverside.com/feature/Why-GitHub-renamed-its-master-branch-to-main GitHub changed it’s defaults to reflect this opinion as part of it’s larger mission to include more people in free and open source software, and to do a better job of making Nazis feel uncomfortable and unwelcome. About zipped vs unzipped: Around minute 10:25 of the installation video, I click on the downloaded ‘knausj-talon-master.zip archive,’ and that action unzips the archive and opens a window showing an unzipped folder, which I then copy into my talon user home furrctory. So I am moving the unzipped talon-knausj-master folder into my talon user home directory. -Tara |
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Tara Roys
The short version is that the repository has been renamed, and knausj-talon-master.zip and knausj-talon-main.zip are the same thing. And yes, the zip should be extracted into the talon user directory. Talon will not be able to use a compressed archive. Also, the next issue you will probably run into if you are using both NVDA and Talon at the same time is that NVDA speaks things out loud and Talon listens for voice commands. The short fix to that is wearing headphones. The next message is the long, possibly overly detailed version of the same answer. -Tara Tara |
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David Lenton
Tara
Thanks for the explanation, the additional detail is always appreciated. I realise now you have a quicker method for extraction of ZIP files than I use. We will continue with the installation now. David |
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