508 - Dragon Speech recognition software issues

@travis.d.peltier - thanks for filing this issue.

Can you provide more detail about which pages fall into (A) or (B) ?

On pages that do work, Dragon indicates there are too many links to generate voice commands and so users are unable to proceed.

Ouch! This could be a tough thing to address.

Just echoing Andrew's comment & extending it a bit. We need more DNS testing. Thanks for these observations. Are there any best practices that you can suggest in the DNS community?

Thanks Travis!

Hello,

I'm a Dragon NaturallySpeaking user to use version 14. I've had this issue on other websites as well one of the things that I found that can work is that if you simplify the number of links on a page it allows Dragon to make up its mind. So when constructing a page it's best to not have too many links or for that matter links on top of each other. I would say roughly if there are more than 60 links on any given screen, Dragon can get a little bit confused.

Hopefully this helps.

@psbooks_32 is there an open bug for this in the Dragon NaturallySpeaking community? I know that Freedom Scientific recently opened up their issue queue for greater transparency. Hopefully this is the case for DNS.

So what we need to ask is: how many links is too many for DragonNS? @psbooks_32 suggests around 60.

What might help here is to know if there are particular pages this happens on...

Take the admin/content listing for instance. Once a site has lots of content, you can have 50 rows in the table. Each row has 3 links: node title, node author, and edit operation. Add the sortable table headers, pagination, breadcrumb, primary tabs, and toolbar - you're in the region of 200 links. (I'm assuming that links which are concealed by display:none, like in the dropbuttons, aren't available to DragonNS.)

Then look at the Views UI settings page for that content listing. The main views settings area has about 50 links, in addition to showing a preview of the entire content listing. So now we have ~250 links on that page.

On the front-end website, a node listing might have read-more, "2 comments", add new comment, image field links, and taxonomy term links. The standard profile only shows 10 nodes, but site builders can easily increase that. Forums pages can have just as many links, because they have node titles, authors, new/unread comments, add new comment, etc.

The original report here isn't clear about whether the site being tested was a fresh install of Drupal core, or a fully fledged project in the real world. If it's the latter then all bets are off - there's no telling how many links a site builder might configure into a page.

Idea: what if the admin/content view showed 25 items per page, instead of 50? That would reduce the total there by 75 links right away.

And maybe we wouldn't have to treat the author name as a link - the purpose of the page is to review a list of content, not provide quick access to user profiles. That would take off another link per row, saving a further 25 links.

Another thing I'm not sure about, is whether it's just the number of links on the page, or the total number of clickable controls. Because if checkboxes and buttons factor into this, there are another 2 "clickables" per row on the admin/content listing, so it's more like 300 in total.

For the first part...

a. The “Click link” command does not work on all pages. Inconsistent behavior.

It would be good to know which links fail to work.

We have some buttons that are styled to look like links: blue text, no border. So maybe that's why "click link fails to work - because they're actually buttons? Some examples I'm thinking of are:

• "edit summary" for the node body field,
• "[edit]" from the machine-name widget when adding a field.
• "show row weights" on draggable tables.
• "show group names" on the CKEditor toolbar configuration (e.g. at admin/config/content/formats/manage/full_html).
• Top-level toolbar items (manage, shortcuts, ...) are HTML link elements with a button role. I don't think it's clear from looking at them if they are a button or a link.

I found a couple of references to how many links might be too many for DragonNS:

1. We believe that NaturallySpeaking is limited to 100 links per web viewing area (viewable area of page on your monitor). NaturallySpeaking numbers the 1st 99 links and anything beyond that is ignored. You might want to avoid the types of commands that number everything on the page when possible. If you're attempting to click on a link simply say the name or part of the name of the link

   Source: KnowBrainer Speech Recognition Forums - Too many links on page? (Forum post from 2008)

2. Browser Error - Too Many Links on Page
   Problem: Dragon is limited to numbering up to 50 hyperlinks, buttons and controls. If you have more than 50
   hyperlinks, you will receive an error message to the effect of “too many links on page”.
   Solution:

   1. Open Windows Explorer.
   2. Use Notepad to open C:\ProgramData\Nuance\NaturallySpeaking12\Users\(your username)
   3. current\options.ini file.
   4. Move your cursor to the end of the file and create a new line
   5. Type Number Of Enumerated Html Elements=500
   6. Save and close file. Relaunch Dragon and note that you can increase 500 if necessary.

   Source: Naturally Speaking Quick Tips (as of 05/04/2018)

There are some interesting things in these references:

• It might be to do with the number of links in the viewport, rather than the whole page.
• The two references disagree about the number, but the more recent one (50) is close to the estimate that @psbooks_32 reported.
• The maximum number of links is configurable. However I wouldn't assume a user would know that, and editing config files by hand is in power-user territory.
• The wording of "Number Of Enumerated Html Elements" suggests that it might be lumping links and other controls together, like I speculated in #10.

I think we've got enough information here to make the issue active again, and some ideas for how we could address part B from the issue summary. I'm going to suggest the ideas from comment #9 to the usability team.

Asked @yoroy in the #ux Slack channel...

Remove author as link would be the quickest win

That reduces it from 3 links to 2 links per row, eliminating 50 links from the maximum

This came up as a daily BSI target

The first think I saw was this mentioned IE11 which is no longer supported. Is this still an issue in other browsers?

Wanted to follow up one more time before closing.

We can always re-open it. I don't know if we have someone who can test with Dragon.

Thanks lets do that!

Assigning credit though.