Disabled programmers need help finding a code editor

Hi everyone,

     I'm new to programming, I am also disabled. I broke my neck 18 years ago and am trying to learn programming. It is very difficult to write code when you can't use your hands. I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 preferred to write this, and it is a great tool for the disabled, but it is very limited when it comes to writing code. I've tried using Windows 7 voice recognition in Visual Studio, what a bad idea that was! It doesn't even understand IDE interface and writing any code with it is totally impossible. I heard some genius tried to make an add-on for Visual Studio to enable voice recognition in C. sharp, but I never heard anything else about it. So I was wondering if anyone out there could suggest a code editor that works well with voice recognition or perhaps teach me how to integrate voice-recognition into an editor of my own creation. By the way usually I write code using what's called a mouth stick, and that is just what it sounds like a stick you hold in your mouth. It is a very inefficient and painful way to do anything. So if you could please drop a suggestion or two it would be very appreciated thanks.

Ironsides 35

I'd be curious to know the answer to this as well.  I tried to create something for visual studio with the Speech SDK 5 back when it came out but after a few days found that it was looking like a pretty big job for me to tackle on the side.  Since then it seems like client side speech progress has halted.

 I'm guessing anything that depends on any voluntary muscle control below the neck is right-out. Have you considered eye-tracking? The idea being you'd have an on-screen keyboard (or perhaps a better input method that does autocomplete and other statistical-based approaches to ease input) that's active in the lower-half of your screen (or on a separate display), but a keystroke is only logged if your eye movement is associated with another action (e.g. a blow down the breathing tube) so you don't make any accidental inputs.

davewill said:

I'd be curious to know the answer to this as well.  I tried to create something for visual studio with the Speech SDK 5 back when it came out but after a few days found that it was looking like a pretty big job for me to tackle on the side.  Since then it seems like client side speech progress has halted.

Thanks for your responses, the speech SDK is great in theory, but in the the the the practical use it's pretty much worthless at the moment.

As far as what W3bbo suggested that is great idea but incredibly expensive. The last time I checked a similar device cost around $998.99 which is far more than I can afford. I live in southeast Georgia, and there are close to 0 dollars coming in that are used to help the disabled right now so getting one through Vocational Rehabilitation is out of the question.

The mouth stick I mentioned above cost nealy $60.00 alone and its just aluminum and plastic. Everything that is geared toward the use of the disabled cost nearlly 4 times a product geared toward a normal person. Liability insurance is killing the companys that make this stuff. So in other words the product is not in my income range.

Thanks Chuck the sentiment is very nice I will stay tuned, and thanks again W3bbo and davewill.

Ironsides35

ironsides35 said:

davewill said:

*snip*

Thanks for your responses, the speech SDK is great in theory, but in the the the the practical use it's pretty much worthless at the moment.

 

As far as what W3bbo suggested that is great idea but incredibly expensive. The last time I checked a similar device cost around $998.99 which is far more than I can afford. I live in southeast Georgia, and there are close to 0 dollars coming in that are used to help the disabled right now so getting one through Vocational Rehabilitation is out of the question.

 

The mouth stick I mentioned above cost nealy $60.00 alone and its just aluminum and plastic. Everything that is geared toward the use of the disabled cost nearlly 4 times a product geared toward a normal person. Liability insurance is killing the companys that make this stuff. So in other words the product is not in my income range.

 

Thanks Chuck the sentiment is very nice I will stay tuned, and thanks again W3bbo and davewill.

 

Ironsides35

Can you set the speech recognition to accept individual characters? For programming I would think that it's much better and faster if you could spell each character seperately.

Charles said:

Hi Ironside35,

 

We have some emails out to folks around the company who can help with suggestions and guidance. Stay tuned.
C

Charles, did you edit my posts again? Censorship is one thing, but it's particularly insidious if you don't declare it.

I wasn't being funny or offensive, just expressing my opinion of a bad situation. There was no bad-taste joke intended.

this kind of corporate sponsorship.... one that empowers people to use the company's products, would be an excellent program for microsoft to adopt.

imagine the goodwill it could generate. imagine the real change it could lead to in people's lives (to be gainfully employed or at the very least have a productive hobby).

even still... $1000 is not all that much amongst a guild. if the eye-tracking hardware is too expensive and if someone else coordinates, i'd put $50 in on it to get ironsides35 going.

itsnotabug said:

this kind of corporate sponsorship.... one that empowers people to use the company's products, would be an excellent program for microsoft to adopt.

 

imagine the goodwill it could generate. imagine the real change it could lead to in people's lives (to be gainfully employed or at the very least have a productive hobby).

 

even still... $1000 is not all that much amongst a guild. if the eye-tracking hardware is too expensive and if someone else coordinates, i'd put $50 in on it to get ironsides35 going.

thax bro that means a lot to people like me.

ZippyV said:

ironsides35 said:

*snip*

Can you set the speech recognition to accept individual characters? For programming I would think that it's much better and faster if you could spell each character seperately.

This  can be done, with the "SPELL" command using  dragon but you already mentioned why this is impracticle. Seplling out every line of code will take forever to write even a simple program. And Ms Speech recognition wont do it unless you are using notepad or wordpad or something else that is compatible with it and programs like notepad++ and jedit don't cut the mustard I'm afraid. Any ways thanks for the suggestion I have acctualy tried to do this and was so out of breath frustrated by all the mistakes dragon made trying to figure out my southeast Georgia accent I had to stop after the first line. Lololol. Thanks bro.

ironsides35 said:

ZippyV said:

*snip*

This  can be done, with the "SPELL" command using  dragon but you already mentioned why this is impracticle. Seplling out every line of code will take forever to write even a simple program. And Ms Speech recognition wont do it unless you are using notepad or wordpad or something else that is compatible with it and programs like notepad++ and jedit don't cut the mustard I'm afraid. Any ways thanks for the suggestion I have acctualy tried to do this and was so out of breath frustrated by all the mistakes dragon made trying to figure out my southeast Georgia accent I had to stop after the first line. Lololol. Thanks bro.

I don't think generalized speech recognition is going to work for this. That said, I think speech recognition can be made to work for coding, it just needs to be heavily specialized.

I'm envisioning an editor that will autocomplete common constructs based on speech commands (kind of like snippets) instead of having to punctuate everything yourself. It would have to context-aware to know when it should be listening for an identifier, a keyword, an operator, etc. It should have a separate mode to define variable/type/method/property/etc. names (which would probably need to be done using spelling). It should then listen for those identifiers which are in scope at the current editing position.

I would certainly not be impossible to build something like this with the Windows Speech API. It might even be possible to do it as a VS add-in. But to make it truly flexible and usable enough would not be easy.

Charles said:

Chris, come on... Not on this thread, please....

C

What stops you from banning him and removing his post, Mr moderator?

ZippyV said:

Charles said:

*snip*

What stops you from banning him and removing his post, Mr moderator?

Or maybe even just modifying it