Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

Weirdly, I didn't have any problem teaching Dragon on the Mac to do command-and-control -- in fact, I found it much, much easier than dictation (but that's because the cognitive load of composing meaningful communication to speak out loud, for me, is orders of magnitude higher than the cognitive load of composing meaningful communication to type -- there's something really fucking broken in my brain-to-mouth pathway that's not broken in my brain-to-fingers pathway). I'm not sure if that reflects the fact I was using a very recent version of Dragon and things have improved considerably, or if it's because of my willingness to program all kinds of shortcuts, macros, etc.

It also helped, I think, that Dragon for Mac uses AppleScript instead of VB, and I'm reasonably competent in AppleScript (or used to be, and was warming it back up out of cold storage until I decided dictating-qua-dictating wasn't working for me and it wasn't worth investing more time and cognitive load in adapting the tools more).

If it weren't for the struggles I was having in finding a wireless microphone that worked for me and worked on my OS, I probably would still be using Dragon for command-and-control and saving my typing for the actual composition bits. I found it very helpful, especially since I have always been a keyboard C&Cer (even during the dark years when Mac operating systems made it as hard as possible to C&C via keyboard) and many of the keyboard shortcuts force the largest burden of chording onto the left hand, which is my worse hand. (I was going to say 'my bad hand', but, well, they're both pretty bad.) I often find myself, when doing heavy formatting work or rapid program switches, with my left hand splayed in very unnatural positions and held there unconsciously to minimize time: thumb on the clover key, pinky on the tab key, middle finger on the W key, index finger going back and forth between X, C and V. (Clover-X, clover-tab, clover-V, clover-tab, clover-W, clover-X, cover-tab... cut, switch program, paste, switch program, close window, cut, yadda.) It lets me get through data entry or formatting or whatever ten times faster than other people, but it does take physical toll.

(I'm not kidding on the 10x faster. I had a job in my early 20s that involved basically robotic data entry with a little bit of discretion, and it wasn't scriptable. I processed over 80% of stuff, in a department of 15 people.)

Anyway. I do not mean to suggest that I am in any way characteristic of what others' experience would be, just that I found C&C using Dragon Dictate to be very easy (and much less frustrating than the actual dictation/composition part).