Getting Online Screen Reader: Exploring the Browser

Hello, my name is Ricky Enger, and today we're going to learn a little about our web browser, which is the program we use to access all the wonderful information that's available online. We're using the Google Chrome browser along with NVDA as our screen reader, but the concepts we learn here will be pretty similar, no matter which browser and screen reader we're using. Okay, so before we can learn how to use our browser, we first need to open it and we can do that in a couple of different ways. The first way is to use a shortcut on our desktop. So we'll press our Windows key, plus the letter D, D for desktop.

Screen Reader: Folder view list.

Ricky: And now, since our desktop shortcut is called Google Chrome, we'll just press the letter G until we land on it.

Screen Reader: Google Chrome, seven of eight.

Ricky: And there it is. But sometimes for whatever reason, we may not have a shortcut on our desktop. Well, Windows 10 has a really cool feature called the search bar, where we can just type in the program we wanna open and Windows will find it for us. So let's press the Windows key by itself.

Screen Reader: Start window, search window, search box edit blank.

Ricky: And now we'll just start typing the word Chrome.

Screen Reader: Google Chrome app. Press right to switch preview one of three.

Ricky: And there it is. Let's press enter to open it.

Screen Reader: New tab Google Chrome, address and search bar edit has auto-complete, control plus L, blank.

Ricky: Great. Now, if your screen reader says something a little different than address and search bar, let's go ahead and press Alt plus D, which is our shortcut to get to the address and search bar. Now, when we get to our address and search bar, our screen reader gives us a ton of information. So let's just concentrate on these last few words, address and search bar edit. What does all that mean? Well, edit means we're in a place where we can start typing and address and search bar is the place in our browser where we can type in the website we wanna visit. So hadley.edu, google.com, bookshare.org. These are all examples of websites or web addresses that we can type in here. Let's go ahead and type in bookshare.org.

Screen Reader: Bookshare.org.

Ricky: And we'll press Enter to open it.

Screen Reader: Bookshare, an accessible online library for people with print disabilities.

Ricky: And there we go. Our website just opened and the web page automatically starts reading, But wait, website, web page, is there a difference? Yes, actually, our website, bookshare.org in this case, is made up of a number of different web pages. There's a Help Center page, a Getting Started page and a Log in page, just to name a few. So our website is made up of multiple web pages inside it. Then what are our pages made up of? We'll be covering this a lot more in depth later in the series, but web pages contain a lot of different things or elements that we can work with. Links that take us from page to page and edit boxes where we can type in information are just a couple of examples.

Okay, so let's talk about one last thing before we go. If we're moving around a lot on a website and we visit different pages within that site, it's kind of a lot to keep track of. It would really be nice if there were a quick way to get the title of the page we're on just to remind us of where we are. Thankfully there is, we just need to know about one key, the NVDA key. This is actually just the Insert key on our keyboard, but we can call it the NVDA key because we can use it in combination with other keys in order to get specific information from NVDA. So we'll hold down our Insert key and we'll press the letter T, T for title.

Screen Reader: Bookshare, an accessible online library for people with print disabilities, Google Chrome.

Ricky: And there we go. Our screen reader just told us the title of the page we're on, yay. So now we know how to open our browser, type in our web address and open a website. How cool is that? I'm Ricky Enger and I'm glad you could spend a little time with me today exploring the Chrome web browser. Wanna learn more? Join me for other workshops in this series on getting online. See you next time.