I will contact Knowbrainer (www.knowbrainer.com), who has developed some terrific software to work with Dragon, provides great support, and gives their software away to disabled users (the main market for voice recognition is corporate). They might be willing to start using Zotero and they would actually have the knowledge to help with debugging
An undertaking that is almost worth the kick in the teeth that precedes it.
Adjust.
In my case, that's easily done. The part of Zotero with which I am most familiar has no user interface, and I am pleased to have the luxury of completely exiting the conversation at this point.
By way of farewell, I will say that I really do hope that you are able to sort out your usability issues, uptownsean, and I also really hope that you will one day be able to break the extremely irritating habit you have of attacking those more patient souls who express a willingness to help you in that task.
The total operating budget of Zotero is probably less than the price for 20 campus licences for Endnote.
I assume before coming here and berating a number of well-intentioned people you spent years protesting your University's office for disability services for not investing more money in helping to create open source accessibility solutions?
You cannot simply ignore the fact that this comes down to a resource issue.
If you want your software for free, you will have to, essentially, rely on people to volunteer their time (and treat them accordingly). If you want to change things at a more general level, lobby foundations and companies (google?) to invest in open source accessibility solutions. Otherwise, as you note, there are commercial alternatives.
Just an add-on technical question. I'm trying to use the built in Windows 7 voice recognition with the 'notes' field in Zotero, basically to dictate quotations from texts I'm working on as an alternative to typing them; and even when I click in the note box, or use it as a stand-alone item, the voice recognition won't type into it. When I use the 'number' command to see what clickable fields are recognised on the zotero page all - *but* - the text one are. As a workaround I can dictate especially lengthy chunks into word pad then cust and past, but that kind of takes away from the 'grab n go' use of zotero as a note taking scratchpad. I'm using the 2.07b.6 beta. Any ideas, anyone?
I would be very interested in an update on this. I have been experimenting with windows seven speech recognition as well and it is very impressive when used in programmes like Word and Wordpad. But as stated above does not seem to work with Zotero notes. Very little seems to get picked up and what does comes out as rubbish.
With the TinyMCE demos and indeed this forum input box the recognition is better. However, each time you say somethng it brings up an insert a box and then you have to press insert.
Well worth looking at because not being a touch typist I could save huge amunts of time dictating notes from a journal article.
When you open a note, there is an "html" link in its toolbar. Clicking on that will open a popup that accepts plain text input. Does that work better with voice recognition?
Thank you - yes it does. Still not ideal and it may be easier to dictate into Wordpad and cut and paste - for example commands are not as easily recognised and some not at all.
From the code that seems to run the note field (at zotero@chnm.gmu.edu/chrome/content/zotero/tinymce/note.html), it looks like there is no fallback to a text input box in the HTML. That's an understandable decision, since if Javascript is disabled, Zotero as a whole won't run. But if TinyMCE is causing problems for accessiblity, there would be a case for providing an input fallback here, and an option in about:config to turn off the wysiwyg editor for this field. But that's just me talking out of the side of my mouth.
Maybe Dan will have views on whether that's an option, and whether there is a simple way to run a trial with the note set as a plain text input box, to see if that would work an improvement.
I was in equal parts glad and slightly irritated to see this comment:
"Zotero has always been designed with the needs of users with disabilities in mind.
For example, in order to assist users with disabilities, all mouse-driven Zotero functionality should also be accessible via keyboard input. To the best of our knowledge, any voice-driven control should also be able to access this functionality."
As someone who has recently developed serious wrist problems, I have no idea what this keyboard input is. It's great that it's apparently there, but I would like to know where I'm supposed to go to figure out how to use it. I searched the documentation and forums for "accessibility" and "keyboard input" and came up with basically nothing.
Here are the keyboard shortcuts
http://www.zotero.org/support/preferences/shortcut_keys
within Zotero you can use tab and arrows to get around.
I don't use these a lot so I don't know how well they work -
e.g. I wouldn't know how to use the URL bar item through the keyboard, same is true for a bunch of other functions (attachments for example?)
Also, while you can circle through the right-hand pane using tab, it doesn't scroll automatically.
I wouldn't know how to use the URL bar item through the keyboard
AFAIK there is no keyboard shortcut for this ATM (see here). Some people have had success using the vimperator firefox add-on as described here.
As an aside I would seriously suggest you look into vimperator if you have difficulty using a mouse, I've had a bit of a play with it and while it does have a bit of a learning curve (which you can considerably flatten by temporarily re-enabling the menus using the instructions given on the quick start page when you install it) it seems that it should allow a more or less completely mouseless firefox while maintaining efficiency and usability.
Upgrade Storage
By way of farewell, I will say that I really do hope that you are able to sort out your usability issues, uptownsean, and I also really hope that you will one day be able to break the extremely irritating habit you have of attacking those more patient souls who express a willingness to help you in that task.
I assume before coming here and berating a number of well-intentioned people you spent years protesting your University's office for disability services for not investing more money in helping to create open source accessibility solutions?
You cannot simply ignore the fact that this comes down to a resource issue.
If you want your software for free, you will have to, essentially, rely on people to volunteer their time (and treat them accordingly). If you want to change things at a more general level, lobby foundations and companies (google?) to invest in open source accessibility solutions. Otherwise, as you note, there are commercial alternatives.
Just an add-on technical question. I'm trying to use the built in Windows 7 voice recognition with the 'notes' field in Zotero, basically to dictate quotations from texts I'm working on as an alternative to typing them; and even when I click in the note box, or use it as a stand-alone item, the voice recognition won't type into it. When I use the 'number' command to see what clickable fields are recognised on the zotero page all - *but* - the text one are. As a workaround I can dictate especially lengthy chunks into word pad then cust and past, but that kind of takes away from the 'grab n go' use of zotero as a note taking scratchpad. I'm using the 2.07b.6 beta. Any ideas, anyone?
With the TinyMCE demos and indeed this forum input box the recognition is better. However, each time you say somethng it brings up an insert a box and then you have to press insert.
Well worth looking at because not being a touch typist I could save huge amunts of time dictating notes from a journal article.
When you open a note, there is an "html" link in its toolbar. Clicking on that will open a popup that accepts plain text input. Does that work better with voice recognition?
Maybe Dan will have views on whether that's an option, and whether there is a simple way to run a trial with the note set as a plain text input box, to see if that would work an improvement.
"Zotero has always been designed with the needs of users with disabilities in mind.
For example, in order to assist users with disabilities, all mouse-driven Zotero functionality should also be accessible via keyboard input. To the best of our knowledge, any voice-driven control should also be able to access this functionality."
As someone who has recently developed serious wrist problems, I have no idea what this keyboard input is. It's great that it's apparently there, but I would like to know where I'm supposed to go to figure out how to use it. I searched the documentation and forums for "accessibility" and "keyboard input" and came up with basically nothing.
http://www.zotero.org/support/preferences/shortcut_keys
within Zotero you can use tab and arrows to get around.
I don't use these a lot so I don't know how well they work -
e.g. I wouldn't know how to use the URL bar item through the keyboard, same is true for a bunch of other functions (attachments for example?)
Also, while you can circle through the right-hand pane using tab, it doesn't scroll automatically.
As an aside I would seriously suggest you look into vimperator if you have difficulty using a mouse, I've had a bit of a play with it and while it does have a bit of a learning curve (which you can considerably flatten by temporarily re-enabling the menus using the instructions given on the quick start page when you install it) it seems that it should allow a more or less completely mouseless firefox while maintaining efficiency and usability.