Five winning stories will be selected by a panel of judges, and the winning entrants will each receive an Amazon Kindle 2 as well as Dragon NaturallySpeaking upgrades for three years.
I had never thought I would really need to bother with VR software-- after all, I had earned a PhD in English from the University of Iowa and had never needed to compose any essay with voice recognition-- I couldn't even imagien trying to use it to write my 100+ page dissertation! VR was simply a cool idea which would never apply to me
Enter, of course, my own personal "dragon"-- in January of this year, I was diagnosed with Relasing-Remitting Multiple Sclerosis after almost two years of bizarre weakness in my hands and legs and one bad case of vertigo. It was the vertigo which sent me on my odyssey to Phoenix to eventually be diagnosed 2 years after things had started to go wrong in gradual stages.
Of course, I came home to a lot of rehab and the knowledge there was a reason I couldn't really type well anymore-- the lesions in my brain were very near the motor areas of the brain, and I had lost permanently some control and speed in my hands. As an English professor, this was more than annoying-- it could be potentially disastrous. And then I remembered that VR technology.
First I got it for my home and learned how much easier it made emailing, grading essays, and simply surfing. I didn't have to worry so much about "losing independence" in terms of communicating, because I could use Dragon to do so much that my hands had done before. Then, I had my school get it for my office and it made a huge difference in how much work I could do and how fast I could do it. So though I had been very concerned with the loss of brain matter and the difficulties ahead with MS, and had worried that somehow MS would "take over", my doctors, friends, and technology like Dragon has made it possible to feel more in control and less like a victim.
Maybe it seems like a small thing-- the ability to write an email or compose a letter to friends-- but without it, a person who is by nature and education very verbal feels more than lost. So thanks, Dragon, for all you have helped me do!