Hands-Free
Writing database software by voice. Setup, tips, and no inspirational music.

The short version | My setup | Training a speech program | Programming out loud | Paying for it | Christopher Reeve | Diving | Bloopers

The short version

I'm Adam Masters. I'm 34, I live in Austin, Texas, and I write database programs for a living: order tracking for a feed store, patient scheduling for two dental offices, a parts inventory for a machine shop, reports nobody reads until they're wrong. I've done it from home since 1995.

In July 1987, when I was 22, I dove off a friend's dock into a lake I'd been swimming in since I was a kid. The water was lower that summer. I broke my neck at C5-C6. I can move my shoulders and bend my elbows, and I have some wrist movement on the right side. I don't have use of my fingers. I drive a power wheelchair with a joystick.

Every page like this one seems to have a paragraph about courage. This one doesn't. I didn't choose this, and I don't think working for a living is brave. It's just what you do if you'd like to pay rent. What I do think is useful is the details, so here they are.

My setup

• The computer. A Pentium II with 128 megabytes of memory. Speech recognition eats memory. Buy all you can afford and then a little more.
• The software. Dragon NaturallySpeaking since 1998. Before that, from 1995, DragonDictate, which wants a pause between every single word. More on that below.
• The microphone. A noise-canceling headset microphone. Not the cheap one in the box. The microphone matters more than anything else on this list.
• A mouthstick. For quick keyboard work: hitting Escape, an arrow key, Page Down. I keep it in a holder clamped to the desk where I can get it without help.
• A trackball. I run it with the side of my right hand. Mouse buttons are big and set to toggle so I don't have to hold one down to drag.
• A hands-free speakerphone. Clients call. I answer with a switch by my head.
• An environmental control unit. Lights, the fan, the TV and the front door lock, run from the same switch setup. Living alone some of the day depends on it.

My attendant, Tommy, sets me up at the desk in the morning, and after that I work alone until he comes back in the evening.

Training a speech program

Out of the box, speech recognition is a bad typist with a good attitude. It gets better only if you train it, and keep training it. What I've learned:

1. Do the enrollment properly. When you set up a new user, it has you read passages aloud so it can learn your voice. Read them the way you really talk, in a normal voice, not your news-anchor voice. Plan on half an hour, in one sitting.

2. Correct, don't retype. This is the big one. When it gets a word wrong, use the correction command and pick or spell the right word. If you just delete it and dictate it again, the program never learns that it was wrong. Every correction makes it a little smarter about you.

3. Add your own words. Table names, client names, odd spellings, your street. Feed it documents you've already written so it learns your vocabulary.

4. Quiet room. In Austin in August the air conditioner kicks on every twenty minutes, and for a while every time it did I'd get a string of little words like "and the of in." A fan blowing across the microphone does the same. Point fans away, close the door, and put the microphone to sleep when someone walks in to talk to you.

5. Same distance, every time. Put the microphone in the same spot, about a thumb's width from the corner of your mouth, out of the path of your breath.

6. Talk in phrases. NaturallySpeaking takes continuous speech, and it does better with whole phrases because it uses the words around a word to guess it. After three years of DragonDictate I had to unlearn the pause between words. It took me a month.

7. A head cold wrecks everything. Stuffed up, my accuracy falls apart. I made a second user, "Adam with a cold," and trained it the last time I was sick. It helps some. Mostly I take sick days like everybody else.

8. Take care of your voice. It's your keyboard now. Keep water at the desk, take a break every hour, and don't shout at the computer, as satisfying as that is.

Programming out loud

Prose is easy. Code is all punctuation and made-up words, which is the worst case for a speech program. What works for me:

• Voice commands for anything I say more than twice a day. I have about two hundred: one phrase types a whole query skeleton, another opens the client's database, another puts in my standard comment header.
• Spelling mode for variable names, with the military alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie). It's slower but it's never wrong.
• Naming things so they're easy to say. My tables have names a person can pronounce. My clients don't know that's why.
• Short, frequent saves. Saying "save" costs nothing.

I'm probably a little slower than a programmer with ten fingers. I'm a lot faster than I was with a mouthstick, and my clients have never once asked how the code got typed.

Paying for it

The software, the computer, the good microphone and the switches add up to more than most people have lying around. Mine came through the state vocational rehabilitation agency. In Texas that's the Texas Rehabilitation Commission; every state has one. If you have a work goal they agree is reasonable, they can help pay for equipment and training that gets you there.

• Ask for an assistive technology evaluation before anybody buys anything.
• Get your plan in writing, and keep copies of every letter.
• Be specific about the job. "I want to work with computers" got me nowhere. "I'm going to write database software for small businesses, and here's what I need" got me a plan. My counselor, Paula, was terrific once I gave her something to work with.
• It took four months. Start early.

Christopher Reeve

People ask me about him, so: he was injured in a riding accident in May 1995 and is paralyzed from the neck down. Since then he has spoken out for spinal cord research, at the Academy Awards in 1996 and at the Democratic convention that summer, and he went back to work, directing a film for HBO. I don't need anybody to inspire me. But he has put spinal cord research on the evening news, and research is the thing that might matter to the next kid who goes off a dock.

Two pages I'd send you to

• Speaking Terms: Margo Quintanilla, a blind computer teacher in San Jose, on screen readers and braille displays, paying for them, and how to make your web page talk. If you build pages, read her tips.
• The Curb Cut Report: report cards for Sacramento restaurants, shops and theaters from a wheelchair user with a tape measure. I wish somebody would do Austin.

And when you need a laugh: things my computer thought I said.

Dictated, not typed. Counter:
Questions about voice setups are welcome: [email protected]. Pity is not. I answer within a day or two.
Last updated September 18, 1999