Make the website respond to Apple voice dictation for navigation

accessibilitygoogle-chromesafarivoice-dictationweb-browsing

I'm learning about how to add accessibility into my website and want to include Apple voice dictation as a way to navigate the site.

Actually writing this question using voice dictation and hope that there is some way to navigate webpages without using my hands.

Best Answer

I'm not sure how accurate or the usability of this would be, but it might be possible. On your website you would need a few things.

  1. A textbox of some sort that one would be able to dictate the commands into
  2. When the page loads, call the .focus() on the textbox, which will allow the user to call up dictation (Double press Fn) and tell you what they want to do.
  3. Bind a jQuery .change() on this textbox, which would then parse what the user would have dictated in the textbox
  4. jQuery action based on the command, whether it is a redirect, or scroll, etc.
  5. Clear out the textbox and get ready for the next command

There are some shortcomings, such as

  1. The user will still have to initialize dictation in some way (Double press Fn) whenever a new page is loaded, unless you are loading everything through AJAX in div.
  2. Where should the textbox be, and should it be visible to every user at all times?
  3. Teaching your users the proper commands to use
  4. Would this work on a Windows or Linux PC?

It is definitely an interesting idea, but I don't think it has a very practical use, as there are many other accessibility programs on Mac such as VoiceOver that work very well. This is just a general overview, and there is a lot more complexity to it than shown above, especially when it comes to what commands do what and if you want to try and support natural language processing. I hope this helps!

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