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.
As a quadriplegic, for me it's quite simple, Dragon NaturallySpeaking is indispensable in my life. Dragon allows me to be a far more productive member of our family and society. Without it, I could not. It is the difference between being productive and being inactive. With Dragon, I am able to do everything an able-bodied person would do with a computer. And in this digital age that's a lot! I pay our family bills on the Internet and track our household expenses on spreadsheets, shop online for gifts and all variety of essentials, use the Internet for research and social interaction, send e-mails, convert cassette tapes to MP3 files and of course manipulate my iTunes. Otherwise I would be relegated to lots of TV viewing.
In 2004, I was an avid amateur off-road motorcycle racer living in the mountains of southern California with my wife and two small daughters. On Thanksgiving weekend that year I crashed during a race, landed on my head, broke my neck, and sustained a spinal cord injury resulting in C4 level quadriplegia.
My introduction to Dragon NaturallySpeaking began while I was still on the rehabilitation wing of Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. As soon as I was into a wheelchair and able to access the computer lab, the speech pathologist began teaching me Dragon. It was a wonderful feeling to be back communicating with all my fellow off-road motorcycle enthusiasts via the online forums I frequented before my accident.
These days I am able to not only operate my computer hands-free, but the features and shortcuts within Dragon allowed me to do so often more quickly than someone using a keyboard and mouse. I am so satisfied with the program that I've begun advocating its usage and training others. I now work at a local senior center to provide Dragon training not to just seniors but anyone in the community who can benefit from all it has to offer. Just in the last few months I've introduced Dragon to another quadriplegic who has no hand or arm function whatsoever, a man whose brain injury results in hand tremors that make continuous typing extremely difficult, and probably most satisfying of all, a 17-year-old boy with a learning disability that had always required him to dictate his school work to his mother for transcription. My enthusiasm for the program makes it rewarding and just plain fun to share my knowledge with them.
On a side note, as soon as my eight-year-old daughter could read well enough, I had her create her own Dragon voice file. Frankly, I was amazed at how well she took to the program. As kids are apt to do, she was immediately able to dictate text and control the computer by voice just by what she had absorbed from listening to me use Dragon.
Thanks for making my life as it is, possible.