There's a great article out on the Windows Vista beta experience portal showcasing Windows Speech Recognition by Richard Costall entitled "Look, no hands". I especially liked his demonstration of using Visual Studio 2005 via speech. In it, he points out several frustrations that I have also experienced using the program, but he proves that there are many excellent features in Windows Speech Recognition that can be used to sidestep some of Visual Studio's accessibility issues. In fact, he highlights the use of the Start Typing command as his means of actually coding the obligatory "Hello, World" application that he is demonstrating. If you're interested in more details on using the Start Typing command, be sure to take a look at my earlier post as well.
The other day, a colleague submitted a programming request to me to try to improve the way some of the pages on our company web site print out. Knowing that I had trouble handling traditional paper documents because of my disability, she was polite enough to ask if we could just set up a quick meeting so she could show me the printed examples and flip through the pages for me. Although I appreciated the friendly gesture of help, I like it when I can suggest simpler, more accessible solutions that really end up saving time for everyone involved. So I asked if she could simply just print an XPS document instead of messing with a hard copy at all. And as somewhat expected, I promptly received a confused "What's an XPS document?" in return. So then, what is an XPS document? Well, if you are really technically savvy and want to know the details, then I'd suggest looking elsewhere, perhaps starting by reading all about the XML Paper Specification at Microsoft . But if
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