Transcript:

Welcome to my tutorial Getting Help From People On The Talon Slack. In this tutorial, you will notice that I say ‘listen’ before every command. This is because I am dictating this tutorial in Talon’s sleep mode, and I have set up my listen command so that it wakes Talon up and runs exactly one command before falling asleep. This lets me both read this tutorial out loud and demonstrate the commands.

If you do this walkthrough in command mode, you don’t need to say ‘listen’ before everything.

Where can you go to talk to real people if you need help with Talon? The official space for talking to real people about real Talon problems is the Talon Slack.

The Talon Slack

Many people like to talk to a real person when they get tech support. The best place to get Talon help from real people is the #help channel on the Talon Slack, located at http://Talonvoice.Slack.com/messages/help. There you will find real humans chatting about various issues they are having with Talon. The Talon Slack community is very active and questions are often answered within a day.

Next, let’s go to the Talon Slack, and, specifically, directly to the #help channel using voice commands. If you do not have a Slack account, it will require you to create one. If you are logged out of your account, it will require you to log in. To get there, say the voice command open talon slack.

If you are taken to the login window, log in or sign up. If you want to use voice commands for the log in and sign up process, you can look up the voice commands for spelling out individual letters with help alphabet, the voice command for symbols with help symbols, and you can use the commands tab to move from one clickable element on the page to the next, and the command shift tab to move backwards one clickable element in case you overshoot.

Once the Talon Slack #help channel loads, your focus is by default in the ‘new message’ box at the bottom of the page, which you can tell if you have a either blinking cursor in that message box or if the command sentence I need help period types the sentence I need help.

Sometimes the webpage does not automatically put the focus in the new message box, and I will tell you how to troubleshoot that on the next three steps.

Sometimes the blinking cursor does not show up in the new message box. The most common reason for this is that you already have Slack open in a different browser tab and for some reason this messes with things. Following is my favorite way to force the browser window to have focus.

First, you can simulate a mouse click by saying mouse grid to open the mouse grid, saying numbers (like one or two) to position the mouse, and saying touch to click the mouse. Clicking anywhere in the browser window makes the browser window have focus and will make Slack keyboard shortcuts work. Then say super near to press the windows-n keyboard combination, which is the shortcut to focus on the new message box.

Once you’ve gotten to the message box, you can dictate your request for help. Use the sentence command to dictate a sentence starting with a capital letter. Use the say command do dictate a phrase. Use period, comma, exclamation point, and question mark to dictate punctuation. Don’t worry about having bad grammar or bad English, or bad punctuation. When you are satisfied with your message, say enter.

Here is an example of the commands I used to dictate a help message.

`sentence hello world.` 
`scratch that` 
`sentence I need help remembering how to access the symbols menu period` 
`space` `Sentence what is the command to access the symbols menu` 
`question mark` 
`enter` 

And that is how to ask for help on the Talon Slack!

One final note: people on the Talon Slack understand that people coming to the help channel are often coming for help because they are disabled and don’t know Talon voice commands yet. It would be unfair to expect an arthritic person distracted by pain to torture their hands and mind by typing and editing excruciatingly correct English, so people in the #help channel don’t get snooty about ‘grammar’ or ‘punctuation’ as long as your question is even vaguely understandable.