Hands Free Computer Operation for Quadriplegics?

Anonymous Coward asks: "Dragon Natural Speaking dropped hands free computer operation support back in version 3. My quadriplegic friend recently upgraded his computer and it came with Windows XP. His old Dragon Natural Speaking will not work on Windows XP. Does anyone know of any complete voice activated computer control for Windows XP or Linux?"

Comments

How about...Dragon NaturallySpeaking

[TMLink]

I think you need to look at ScanSoft's product again. Contrary to your statement, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 7 DOES allow hands-free use of the computer. In fact within the past 4 months I have trained 2 people to use it in a hands-free situation. From all of the built in shortcuts for the most popular software (including IE and Office) to the command "mouse grid", which allows you to move the mouse around the screen by only your voice, Dragon NaturallySpeaking will work great. You can even use a command (which I forget off the top of my head) to press specific keys on your keyboard. If he has the patients to sit down and learn all of the commands (which can be done over time...learn mouse grid, then slowly pick up the shortcuts over time), Dragon can be faster than a keyboard/mouse combo. If he has a clear voice, training will take 15 minutes. And it works with XP.

Might I make the suggestion of getting Preferred over Standard. While it's double the cost, it really does seem to do a better job than Standard. Not sure what the difference is (smaller vocab maybe?), but it's there.