A case study of Voice Recognition Technology for Developing Programming Skills for Students with Motor Disabilities

This paper focuses on evaluating a commercial voice recognition technology (Dragon Professional v16), for developing programming skills with a particular emphasis on its utility for people with disabilities. We have designed a testing scenario that involves dictating the same program in three different programming languages: C, Java, and Python. Following the dictation of these programs, the study employs the Word Error Rate (WER) metric to quantify Dragon Professional v16’s performance. The WER for C, Java, and Python were in the range of 13-18%, 20-27% and 3-5% respectively. The findings of this study offer insights for programmers, including those with disabilities, who rely on voice recognition technology to engage with their work.