Fixing Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11/11.5 and Windows 8

I recently upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 8. It was a smooth process and everything on my Lenovo T410 laptop is working well. I’m enjoying the design, speed and features of Windows 8 but found very quickly that Dragon NaturallySpeaking (in my case version 11 updated to 11.5) would not allow me to open voice profiles.  This was a problem but easy to fix.

I was getting the message “User files you have selected cannot be accessed” error when I attempted to open a user profile. This is a permissions problem and can fixed very quickly.

  1. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to your local disk (usually C:)
  2. Go to View and select “Hidden Items”
  3. Open the (usually hidden) ProgramData folder
  4. Open the Nuance folder and then DragonSpeaking 11 (or whatever version you are using)
  5. Right-click on the Users folder and select Properties
  6. Select the Security tab and click on your user name (the one with which you log into Windows)
  7. Put a tick in  the ‘Allow’ box next to the Full Control option
  8. Click on OK and close any other windows you opened (you may wish to reset Windows Explorer’s default Hidden Files setting)

Dragon NaturallySpeaking should now work. Ta da!

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