Windows Screenreader Basics from David Kingsbury

Text Reading, Navigation and Editing

Reading and Navigating Text

The following keystrokes are used for reading and navigating text in the body of Word and Notepad documents, Outlook messages, and pages on the Internet. Where JAWS, NVDA, and Narrator keystrokes differ, this is noted.

• Right/Left Arrow: Move to and read characters to the right and left of the cursor.
• Control Right/Left Arrow: Move to and read the next and previous word.
• Down/Up arrow: Move to and read next and previous line.
• Insert N: Read next sentence (JAWS).
• Insert Y: Read previous sentence (JAWS).
• Alt Down and Up arrow: Read next and previous sentence (NVDA and Narrator).
• Control Down/Up arrow: Move to and read next and previous paragraph.
• Insert Down arrow: JAWS and Narrator Say all command or continuous reading from the point of the cursor.
• Insert A: NVDA Say all command or continuous reading from the cursor when NVDA is set in Laptop keyboard mode.
• Control Home: Move to the top of the document or web page.
• Control End: Move to the bottom of the document or web page.
• Home: Move to the start of the line.
• End: Move to the end of the line.
• Control Page up/Down: Move to previous and next page in Word.

Text Selection and Editing

Most of the above keystrokes, when combined with the Shift key, select the corresponding text. Text selection keystrokes are:

• Shift Right arrow: Select characters to the right.
• Shift Control Right arrow: Select words to the right.
• Shift Down arrow: Select current line.
• Shift Control Down arrow: Select current paragraph.
• Control A: Select the entire document or web page text.
• Shift Control Home: Select from the cursor point to the top of the document or web page.
• Shift Control End: Select from the cursor point to the end of the document or web page.
• Shift Home: Select from the cursor point to the start of the line.
• Shift End: Select from the cursor point to the end of the line.

Once you have selected text, basic editing keystrokes are:

• Control C: Copy selected text.
• Control X: Cut selected text.
• Control V: Paste selected text.
• Delete: Delete selected text.

Cut, paste, and delete functions are not applicable to web pages and other “read only” environments.

If you select text and then want to deselect it, press any of the four Arrow keys, or the Home or End keys. It is important to note that if you select text and then type a character or set of characters, the selected text will be replaced by those characters. Ditto for pressing the Spacebar, Tab, Enter key, and a number of other keys. If you do this mistakenly, immediately Press Undo (Control Z) to cancel this keystroke and restore your selected text.

Understanding Cursor Logic When Editing

When deleting and inserting individual characters, it is important to understand the logic of cursor behavior. Knowing how your screenreader talks to you when doing this will help you avoid frustration, as well as make you more efficient and productive. TO get a sense of cursor behavior and the resulting screenreader feedback, open a new Word document or other text editor and do the following:

1. Type the word “chat,” minus the quotes.
2. Left arrow back until you hear the letter C.
3. Press the Delete key. You will hear the letter H. You have removed the letter C, and the word “hat” remains.
4. Position your cursor on the letter A and press the letter E. This places this letter before the letter A, now giving you the word “heat.”

The Backspace key removes the character just before the announced character, and announces characters as they are deleted. Do the following:

1. Place the cursor on the letter E in “heat.”
2. Press the Backspace key. You will hear the letter H which you have just deleted, leaving the word “eat.”

Many people find it more intuitive to backspace out characters because they hear the characters they are removing rather than the character just after the one deleted. Whichever your preference, the important thing is to understand the logic of your cursor behavior and screenreader feedback.

Here’s another little cursor idiosyncrasy worth understanding. If you are now left with the word “eat on the line, you might logically think there is no way to place text after the T in “eat.” After all, T is the last character on the line, so if you arrow to that letter and all new text goes before the T, how can you possibly place text after the letter T? The answer is that, after typing “eat,” a carriage return code is automatically placed after it. Right arrow once past the letter T and your screenreader will say something sounding like “blank.” Because this carriage return code is present, you can continue typing, for example, adding the letters I N G to compose the word “eating.”

You can also select text and type replacement text over it. If you have misspelled a word, rather than do the individual character editing steps above, you may find it quicker to select that entire word with Control Shift Right arrow and then retype the correct word over it. One other thing: note that when you select a word, the space just after the word is also selected, so edit accordingly, to be sure the right number of spaces are present after the word.

Skim Reading Text

Often, it is not worth your time to read every word in a document. You may want to get a quick general sense of a document’s content before reading it in-depth. You can save yourself a lot of time and be more efficient if you have a skim reading strategy.

Sighted readers often skim read by glancing in a few key places on the page and moving on. How can screenreader users accomplish the same thing? The basic idea is to jump from paragraph to paragraph, listening to just enough text to get a general idea of the content. There are several ways you can do this. Below are a few of them.

The keystroke to jump to the next paragraph and read it is Control Down arrow. To skim read, hold down Control and don’t let it up. Now Down arrow to hear the first few words of the next paragraph. Once you have a quick sense of its content, Down arrow to move to the next paragraph, listen a bit, and so on. Obviously, when you arrive at an important paragraph, listen all the way through. Because Control Down arrow is a Windows keystroke, it works with all three screenreaders.

With JAWS and Narrator, another way to achieve the same result is to use a combination of Quick Keys mode and Scan mode, respectively and P (for paragraph). With JAWS, press Insert and Z together to turn on Quick Keys mode. Now press the letter P to jump to the next paragraph, read a bit, press P again, read some more, and so on.

With Narrator, press Insert and Spacebar together to turn on Scan mode. Now press the letter P to jump to the next paragraph, and proceed the same way as mentioned in the previous paragraph.

NVDA does not support first letter paragraph navigation with P, so only the Control Down arrow technique will work.

Navigating Headings With Your Screenreader

With JAWS, there are two ways to navigate headings in Word documents. First, you can press Insert F6, which gives a list of headings. Up or Down arrow to move through the headings, or first-letter navigate to the heading you want. Press Enter and it will place focus in the document on that heading. You can also press Home and End to the first and last heading in the list, respectively. This also works with Narrator.

Second, and only with JAWS, you can press Insert Z, which takes you out of Edit mode and places you in a virtual mode. JAWS will say “Quick Keys on.” You can then press H to go to the next heading, and Shift H to go to the previous heading. You can also press 1 on the number row to go to the next level one heading, 2 to go to the next level two heading, and so on. Insert Z is a toggle, so press it again to return to Edit mode. JAWS will say “Quick Keys off.”

With NVDA, there are also two ways to navigate headings. For both, you must first switch to Browse mode, which is equivalent to the JAWS Quick Keys mode. To get a list of headings:

1. Press Insert and Spacebar together to switch to Browse mode.
2. Press Insert F7, which opens the Elements list.
3. Press Shift Tab once to a series of radio buttons for the types of elements NVDA can navigate in Word documents. These include links, headings, annotations, errors, and charts.
4. Up or Down arrow to Headings.
5. Press Tab once and you are now in the Headings Tree view. You can navigate here by pressing the Up and Down arrows or first-letter navigating.

Unfortunately, presenting the headings this way is confusing because tree views are organized in levels different than those of headings. For level one headings, NVDA will say “level zero” because it is identifying its level in the tree view hierarchy rather than its level in the headings hierarchy. Level one in the tree view hierarchy means it is a level two heading, and so on. Consequently, I prefer using JAWS or Narrator to access headings lists.

You can also navigate headings by activating Browse mode in NVDA or Scan mode In Narrator with Insert and Spacebar, as above. Then you can press H and Shift H to go to the next and previous heading, as well as navigate by heading level with the keys 1, 2, 3, etc.

Browse mode for NVDA and Scan mode for Narrator are toggles. NVDA makes a noise when you activate it and a different noise when you turn it off. Narrator will say “Scan mode on” and “Scan mode off.”