Getting Online Screen Reader: Getting Around on the Web

Hello, my name is Ricky Enger and today we'll learn a few really useful tips and tricks for getting around on the web. We'll learn how to move back and forth between web pages and we'll learn about browser tabs for when we need more than one website open at a time. We're using the Google Chrome browser along with NVDA as our screen reader, but the concepts we learn will be pretty similar, no matter which screen reader and browser we're using. So before we can learn to move around between pages, we'll need to have a website open, right? So we'll press our alt plus D, that's D as in Delta, shortcut to get to our address in search bar.

Screen Reader: Address and search bar edit has auto complete control plus L blank.

Ricky: And now, let's open the NLS Bard site for downloading audio and braille books. If you're not familiar with Bard, Hadley has a whole series that will get you up and running with this service, so be sure and check that out. Okay, so we'll just start typing our address, which is nlsbard.loc.gov.

Screen Reader: Bard.loc.gov selected instead.

Ricky: Now notice that our screen reader actually speaks the address after the first couple of letters that we type. That's pretty cool. For sites we visited before, our browser tries to predict the address we're typing in and it will save us some time by filling in the rest. We can always verify what address is filled in by using our NVDA keystroke to read the current line. We'll press our NVDA key plus the up arrow key to do that.

Screen Reader: nlsbard.loc.gov.

Ricky: And that's the address we want, so we'll just press enter to open it.

Screen Reader: NLS. NLS selected BARD main page.

Ricky: One of the best links on this site is the one for most recently added books and magazines. It's great to see the new stuff that's been added, so we'll just start exploring this page by pressing our down arrow key.

Screen Reader: Heading level one Bard main page. Heading level three visited link recently added books and magazines, a list of books and magazines added in the last 30 days.

Ricky: And there it is so we'll press enter to open it.

Screen Reader: Selection by recently added books and magazines, displaying items one through 250 of 401.

Ricky: Great. Now that we're here, let's check out what's on this page. Let's go ahead and bring up our elements list with NVDA plus F7 and get a list of links.

Screen Reader: Elements, list, dialogue, tree view. Level zero, go to today's up to the minute additions.

Ricky: Hey, wow. They're adding books even as we speak. Let's go see what's there. We'll press enter to open our link.

Screen Reader: Selection by recently added books and magazines. Displaying items one through 11 of 11 document.

Ricky: Now, we can bring up our list of links again with NVDA plus F7 or we can just use our H key to move by heading since all of our titles have headings. So once we've reviewed the up to the minute additions, we wanna go back a page and review the rest of the recently added books and magazines. How do we do that? Thankfully, we don't have to go type in the address again, we can just use our alt key plus the left arrow key to go back to our previous page.

Screen Reader: Selection by recently added books and magazines, displaying items one through 250 of 401.

Ricky: And there we are back on our most recent books and magazines page. So if all plus left arrow takes us back a page, what does alt plus right arrow do? We'll press that.

Screen Reader: Selection by recently added books and magazines, displaying items one through 11 of 11.

Ricky: And here we are on our up to the minute additions page again. So it works a little like turning pages in a book. Alt plus left arrow will let us flip backward to pages we read before and alt plus right arrow will take us forward to the most recent page we read. Now, each time we close our browser, we'll be starting fresh when we open it again, so that means when we first open our browser, our alt plus left arrow keystroke won't take us anywhere since there's no previously visited page to go back to. Okay, so it's easy to lose track of time browsing through all these new books and just forget about the other things we need to do, like ordering new paper towels and laundry detergent. Let's just leave this page open so we can come back to it later and, meanwhile, we'll go to target.com to get our essentials. So how do we keep this site open and at the same time, open another site to do our shopping? For that, we'll use something called a browser tab. We'll open a new one with a nifty little keystroke, control plus T, T for tab.

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

Ricky: And there we go. It's just like when we first opened our browser and yet it's a little different because we still have our Bard page open somewhere. No worries. We'll get back to it soon. For now, let's type in target.com and press enter.

Screen Reader: Target, expect more, pay less.

Ricky: Cool. We've got our target site open and we can start searching for those paper towels, but what about our books? Where did our Bard site go? We can switch back to it by pressing control plus our tab key. What we'll do this time is press and hold our control key, and then we'll keep holding it while we just tap our tab key. So we'll do this a couple of times.

Screen Reader: Selection recently added books and magazines. Target expect more, pay less. Selection by recently added books and magazines. Target expect more, pay less.

Ricky: And now, let's stop holding down our control key. This tells our browser that this is where we wanna stop and that this is the tab we wanna be in. So this keystroke works if we have two tabs open or if we're working on three or four things at once, we can just press and hold control, use our tab key to move through our open tabs and then stop holding our control key when we find the tab we want. Nice. Now what happens when we're done shopping and we don't wanna keep this tab open anymore? We can just use our control key plus the letter W to close it.

Screen Reader: Selection by recently added books and magazines. Displaying items one through 11 of 11, Google Chrome.

Ricky: And there we go. We've closed our target.com tab and we're back inside the last tab we used, which is our most recently added books and magazines on the Bard site. So let's learn one last keystroke before we go. You know, when we first opened our browser, it always displays the same thing, right? For some of us, it's our address and search bar, for some of us, it's google.com or maybe a news site. Anyway, we call that our start page and we can set it to whatever we'd like it to be in our browser settings. Now, when we've been browsing for a while, what do we do when we're ready to go back to that start page? Well, we've got a great keystroke for that. We'll use our alt key and the home key.

Screen Reader: Address and search bar edit has auto complete control plus L blank.

Ricky: And that will take us right back to our start page. I'm Ricky Enger and I'm glad you could spend a little time with me today, learning tips for getting around on the web. Wanna learn more? Join me for other workshops in this series on getting online. See you next time.