Dragon Naturally Speaking Video 7 – Following Links on Web Pages

In this section we are going to look at how to follow web links when using Dragon, including trying to follow links that are images.

Not surprisingly, the ‘Click (link text)’ command is probably one of the most commonly used commands when you’re browsing a website. It’s best to voice the whole link text when using the command as Dragon will automatically follow the selected link, assuming that there are no other links with the same text. And you’ll note how in Internet Explorer Dragon visually indicates which link it’s following with a small red arrow – this feature is not present in other browsers.

Wake up, Click BBC news, Click weather, Go back, Click news, Go to sleep.

Here Dragon is not sure which link you mean, so it will give you the option numbers for you to choose from.

Wake up, Choose 1,  Go to sleep.

But what happens if a link is actually an image? For example on my own website I have icons on the page for my Twitter feed, my LinkedIn page, my Facebook page and the RSS feed. Because I have used appropriate alternate text for these images Dragon NaturallySpeaking will recognise what the links are.

Wake up, Switch to next tab, Click Twitter, Go back, Click RSS, Go back, Go to sleep.

But what about images that don’t have appropriate alternate text? Let’s see.

Wake up, Switch to next tab, Go to sleep.

Now on this page in the top right hand corner there is an image that resembles a cogwheel. Most of you will probably guess that this is to access something like settings or options. So let’s see how Dragon copes with that since there is no obvious visual clue what the text equivalent is.

Wake up, Click options, Click settings, Go to sleep

The problem here is that the alternate text for this image is not set at all. The title attribute is set to options but Dragon doesn’t pay any attention to title attributes – it’s looking for the alt attribute. So accessing your options on this page using Dragon’s ‘Click’ command doesn’t work very well.