Ergonomically speaking
The
Age Newspaper (IT Section) - 5th August 2003. By Charles Wright.
It was a particularly painful example
of fear of flying. Travelling business class from London to
Singapore, one of our friends worked for 10 hours straight on his
notebook, having bought a new cable that allowed him to plug into
the aircraft's power supply.
It is the sort of thing the committed
road warrior dreams of doing, but late the next day, he felt the
first twinges of pain in the outside of his hands. Over the next few
days the pain travelled up his forearms, to his shoulder and his
back. After a couple of weeks, he had to severely cut back on his
work.
Within a month he could not type. He
was also incapable of twisting a door handle. He had difficulty
sleeping, couldn't exercise, and even sitting in a chair for any
length of time was painful.
His specialist told him he was
suffering from an "impingement" on a nerve at the top of his spine.
It was something that often happened, he said, to people who spent
long hours at a desk. Our friend had been a touch-typist for 20
years, ignoring - as we all tend to do - those warnings about taking
frequent breaks for stretching. It was a long and painful nightmare.
Our friend spent several thousand dollars on a Therapod chair, with
arm rests and adjustable back support. He bought a $1200 DataHand
keyboard, a $160 Microsoft thumb-operated trackball, an adjustable
table and a book support. As the effects worsened, he'd become
incapable of holding a book open.
To allow him to do more of his work
standing up he spent another $300 on a Doro cordless hands-free
phone.
He bought a copy of IBM's ViaVoice
speech recognition software but although it transcribed his
sentences with few errors he found he couldn't use it to do things
such as surfing the web. The manual told him that commands like "Go
to address" and "Click hyperlink" would work. They didn't.
The dictionary didn't include a lot of
technical terms that he used quite often. He tried using the
"analyse documents" command, which in theory sets the program to
scan your documents and add any missing words to the dictionary.
That didn't work either.
I was reviewing the latest release of
Dragon's Naturally Speaking, Version 7, and we thought it might
solve his problems. We included him in the review process.
He didn't have a chance to look at it
until the day he flew to Noosa for a few weeks of recuperation.
Somewhat forbiddingly, he was in precisely the same situation that
had brought on his problem - in fact, somewhat worse, given that he
wasn't in business class this time. Domestic cattle class is not the
best environment for working on a notebook.
But although he could scarcely hear the
flight attendant over the sound of the engines, Dragon Naturally
Speaking gave the "acoustic environment" 20 out of 20 - probably
because he was using a noise-cancelling headset. Because it uses a
dictionary that's been modified for Australian vowel sounds, it was
even better at recording his dictation, and it successfully analysed
his documents - extracting 2000 new words from 4000 of his sent
emails. Within days he was "typing" at 100 words a minute, without
touching a key.
Two months later, he's become an
evangelist for Dragon Naturally Speaking. The program, and the
trackball in particular, got him back to work. In his view, all of
us should be using it, rather than risking injury...
This review used Dragon
NaturallySpeaking Professional Version 7.0 Supplied by Voice Perfect
Systems
The Age Newspaper
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