Marc of the Web

Eric Brown of the Microsoft Speech Development Team recently wrote a simple but highly enlightening article about an oft-misunderstood feature of WSR dictation: Inline Dictation Commands . In the article, he explains how nine special commands “can be uttered in the middle of a dictation stream,” unlike most other commands which require the speaker to pause before and after saying them. (Yeah… I realize that the title of my post utilizes an awful play on words, but at least now you hopefully get the point! :-)) The nine special commands presented in his article are as follows: tab , new line , new paragraph , caps , no caps , all caps , no space , literal , and numeral . Regardless of whether or not you are a newbie or power user of Windows Speech Recognition, knowing how to use these commands in your dictation repertoire will surely help you out, so you would be well advised to read Eric's article.

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