Getting Online Low Vision: Website Basics

I'm Vikki Vaughan and today, we'll learn about various tools we use to move around a web page and to go from one page to another. 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.

Let's start from the NLS website to explore these tools. Essentially, there are three ways to navigate: by pointing and clicking on a heading, a button or a link that automatically takes us to another page by typing a web address into the address bar of the web browser and pressing enter, or by clicking the navigation buttons on the browsers tool bar, which are usually located at the top of the screen. Let's take them one by one.

As we discussed in our workshop, Exploring the Browser, headings are a basic way to organize and bring attention to important information on a website. By separating the critical information, we can more easily locate them. The exact topic in which we're interested. When we select a heading with a mouse click or by pressing the enter key, we open a new web page.

Let's look at the braille and audio reading materials. Heading as an example, this new webpage provides more detailed information about braille and audio materials that are available through the NLS. We can see the page consist of text links. That leads us to our next tool, links. links are the most commonly used element on a web page. They are usually presented as text, and once we've selected a link, the color often changes. As we can see, there are several on the NLS website. We can easily move between links with our mouse pointer. When we select a link, several things can happen. Some links move us to other parts of the same page. They can also take us to other pages within the website. We'll click on the link entitled latest books in braille and audio to see how this works. We are still on the NLS website, but we've opened a new page just like we did when we selected a heading. Links can also take us to external websites, such as when I select the Facebook link in our footer.

Another common way to go to a website is to use our address bar. The address bar is an edit field at the top of our screen where we type in the actual address for a particular website. It's much like writing a person's address on a letter. Let's try it out by going to the Google website. Now, there are a couple of ways we can move our focus to the address bar. We can place our mouse pointer inside the edit field and left click or we can use the keyboard of Alt and the letter D. Now, let's type in Google into our address bar.

For most websites, we would type the address and follow it with a period or dot and a suffix like com or gov. Google is so widely used that Chrome automatically inserts.com for us. Now, you might be wondering what happened to my initial web page? Did I close it when I opened Google? Not to worry. The NLS webpage is still open. We can think of it as waiting in the wings, but how do we get back to it? This is the perfect time to talk about our navigation buttons. They are located at the top of our screen to the left of the address bar. There we find several icons, a left arrow or right arrow, and a semicircle with an arrow. These are our back, forward, and refresh buttons. When we select the back button, we moved back to the webpage we just visited before the current web page.

Let's try that now. We simply click on the back and we're back to the previous page. If we've opened at least two web pages, the forward button allows us to move forward to the page we've most recently opened. I bet it's no surprise if we select the forward key, we land back on the Google website. There's one more navigation button that can prove helpful when browsing. It's the refresh key. This button reloads the webpage. Let's say we're waiting for something to appear on a site that's frequently being updated like stock returns, concert tickets, or airline check in. By selecting this button or using the keyboard shortcut of F5, the page reloads with the most current information.

Today, we discussed various ways to navigate on the web. I'm Vikki Vaughan and I thank you for joining me. This is one in a series of workshops called Getting Online.