Getting Online Low Vision: Saving Favorite Websites

Hi, I'm Vikki Vaughan, and today we'll discuss how to create bookmarks to save and retrieve our favorite web pages. This workshop is intended for users for low vision. If you use a screen reading program, be sure to check out our screen reading version of this workshop.

Once we've started using the web, we find there will be websites that we visit over and over again, sometimes on a daily basis. A good example might be a banking website. It's nice to know that we have an easy way to save these websites so we can quickly locate them. By creating bookmarks, we essentially place it all of our favorite websites into a list. We can then use the list to return to a particular website whenever we wish. No more having to remember an exact website address.

To create a bookmark in our browser, we first must visit the desired site. And we just so happen to be on our banking website. In the address bar we find a star icon at the far right of our address bar. Simply clicking the star will bring up the bookmark added dialog box. We see that the color of the star has changed from clear to blue, and the website's name is highlighted in the name edit field. This tells us we can edit it to any name we choose. Since it's such a long name, let's just shorten it to banking.

Our next control is a combo box labeled folder. This is the destination folder and it tells Chrome where we would like to save our bookmarked website. We see that bookmarks bar is the destination for our bookmarked website. The down arrow icon to the far right tells us that we have other folders in our browser where we can save our bookmark. Let's click on the down arrow to see what pops up.

If your screen looks different, not to worry. I have loads of saved bookmarks and you're seeing some of them here. If you've never created a bookmark, you won't have a long list like mine. By default there are two bookmark folders, bookmarks bar and other bookmarks. At the bottom of the list we see that we also have the option to choose another folder. We won't cover the process of creating other folders today, but I encourage you to explore this option.

The name that appears here will be the folder we last opened in our bookmarks. I can easily use my mouse pointer to select the location where I want to place my new bookmark. Since I like my original destination, the bookmarks bar, I'll press the escape key to close the combo box. Once we've selected the destination, we click on the done button to save our new bookmark. Congratulations, you just created your first bookmark.

Now that our banking website has been bookmarked, let's explore how to open it at a later date. We know we saved it to the bookmarks bar, but what if we don't see this bar, which should be located directly below the address bar. Not to worry. There's an easy method to display it.

Our first method is the fastest. Let's use the keyboard shortcut of control plus shift plus B to show our bookmarks. We can use the same shortcut to hide it. The other method to hide or display our bookmarks bar is to go into our settings menu on the far right of our browser window and click on the three vertical dots. We then move down the menu with our mouse pointer to the bookmarks control. When we hover over bookmarks with our mouse pointer, we see a submenu appear to the left. By moving our pointer to the submenu, we can navigate to the selection entitled, show bookmarks bar.

At the far right of this command we see our keyboard shortcut listed. To make the bar visible in our browser we click the show bookmarks bar command, which places a check mark to the left of the command. We can also use this command to uncheck and hide the bookmarks bar. This places us back in our browser and we can now see the bookmarks bar and yay, we see our bookmark website on the left side of our bookmarks bar. I'll select it with my mouse pointer and voila. Up pops our banking website. Today we discussed techniques for creating and accessing bookmarks in our browser. I'm Vikki Vaughan and I thank you for joining me. This is one in a series of workshops called, Getting Online.