Welcome everyone to the accessibility for the disabled subsection of the MSSpeech Forum. My name is Jerry Ferro and I am your new moderator for this section. Here is a little bit about me.

Personally, my disability is mobility related due to a severe weakness of the muscles. My first experience with voice recognition was around 1991 when I purchased the first voice dictation product that IBM offered for $1000 with a hardware component that had to be installed in the computer. At that time, the computer would only recognize speech spoken one word at a time. I utilized every revision that IBM made to its packages through and including Viavoice 10. After IBM sold its product line to Nuance I purchased Dragon Dictate Preferred 9.0 for about $99.00 and upgraded to version 9.5 when I upgraded my computer to Vista Ultimate. It truly is amazing to compare the price I started with and the price I paid for dragon dictate and how much performance has increased. When I upgraded to Vista I found another surprise in Vista Voice Recognition. Speech recognition is now included as part of the operating system. It’s similar to getting a keyboard with your computer. For those of us with mobility impairments speech recognition has opened the door to total computer access.

Professionally, I am a Licensed Mental Health Counselor in private practice in Altamonte Springs, Florida. I am also a published songwriter/composer and utilize computer technology in that endeavor as well. I look forward to sharing this message board experience with you!