Getting Online Screen Reader: Online Searches

Hello, my name is Ricky Enger and today we'll learn how to search for information online. 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.

One of the coolest things about being online is that we can find information about pretty much anything we've ever wanted to know. Seriously, there's no limit to the things that we can find online. We just need to know how to search for what we want. So how do we do that? Well, let's start with an option that's built right into our Chrome Browser. It's called the address and search bar. And for some of us it's the first thing that pops up when we open our browser. Even if our browser shows us something different when we open it, we can always get to our address and search bar by pressing our Alt key and the letter D.

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

Ricky: So now that we're here, we can enter the address of a particular website we wanna visit, but what if we're looking for something more general? Let's say we're thinking about getting a dog and we're curious about what our options are. So let's just type medium dog breeds here in our address and search bar.

Screen Reader: Medium dog breeds.

Ricky: And we'll press Enter to search.

Screen Reader: Breeds, google.com/searchq equals medium plus dog plus bree--

Ricky: And we used our Control key right away to stop our screen reader from speaking. It's reading us a long website address, which contains the words we searched for among other things, but we don't actually need to hear all that. What we really wanna do is to find the results of our search, so how do we do that? Just like with any webpage, we can start using our Down Arrow key to move through the page, but it will take us a while to get to our search results if we do that. Turns out that Google, which is our default search provider in our Chrome Browser, has put headings on our search results to make it easier for us to find what we want. So let's press our H key to find our first heading.

Screen Reader: Search modes heading level one.

Ricky: Search modes? What does that mean? Let's press our Down Arrow key to read the text under this heading and find out.

Screen Reader: Navigation landmark link Images. Link Shopping. Link Videos. Link News.

Ricky: Ah, okay, this makes a little more sense now. We can press Enter on any of these links, like images or videos, and that will tell Google that we're searching specifically for images or videos of medium dog breeds. Cool, so let's press H again to move to our next heading.

Screen Reader: Content navigation bar heading level one.

Ricky: And we'll press Down Arrow a couple of times to see what this is.

Screen Reader: Navigation landmark clickable link Animal breeds slash link Dog slash Medium. Clickable list with 25 items. Link Golden Retriever, link Bulldog, link German Shepherd, link Australian Shepherd, link--

Ricky: Nice, so this is another way that we can narrow down our results, by pressing Enter on one of these specific breeds. That's a great tool, but we still haven't reached our actual search results, which are webpages that contain the words we've searched for. Now, as always, we could keep either pressing our Down Arrow key to move through the page, or we could even press our H key to move by heading, but here's a little tip. Our search results will always be shown as level three headings. So if we wanna go right to our first search result, we can just press the number 3 and jump to it. So we'll press 3.

Screen Reader: Main landmark medium dog breeds. American Kennel Club heading level three link.

Ricky: And there we go. Our first search result is an article from the American Kennel Club about medium dog breeds. Now, we get a lot of information from our screen reader, and listening to all of that just to pick out the stuff we actually need can take some getting used to, right? It can be hard to figure out what to pay attention to and what isn't essential with all this, so let's break it down a little and talk about what we'll find with each of our search results. Let's press our 3 key to move to our next search result and we'll take this one line by line.

Screen Reader: Medium Sized Dog Breeds Purina heading level three link.

Ricky: Great, so this is our search result and it's a link. We can press Enter to open it. Let's press Down Arrow though and see what's under our link here.

Screen Reader: Link, www.purina.com Dogs Dog Breeds Collections.

Ricky: So this is the address of our page. We're probably not going to memorize that or anything, but it's useful to know that this is coming from the purina.com website. All right, let's press Down Arrow again.

Screen Reader: Menu button collapse sub menu result options.

Ricky: If we press our Spacebar on this button, it will give us a couple of options, such as finding similar results to the one that we're focused on right now. Okay, we'll press Down Arrow again.

Screen Reader: Medium-Sized Dog Breeds. Afghan Hound. Learn More. Airedale Terrier. Learn More.

Ricky: This is our last bit of information about our search result and it's actually a preview of what we'll find when we open our link. This can be really helpful to us, because it can give enough information for us to know whether this is a page we wanna open or whether we wanna skip to the next result. Awesome, this is such a powerful thing, being able to type in anything we wanna learn about and then go through our search results to find exactly what we're looking for. Let's do one last thing before we go. We'll go to our address and search bar again with Alt + D.

Screen Reader: Address and search bar edit has auto complete Control plus L selected HTTPS--

Ricky: And we pressed our Control key to stop. Okay, let's start typing in medium dog breeds again.

Screen Reader: Dium dog breeds selected instead.

Ricky: And notice that as we type Google is actually trying to guess what we might be searching for, just to save us a little time. That's kind of cool, but what if we don't want to search for medium dog breeds? Maybe we wanna search for medium length hairstyles instead. No worries, we can just keep typing until we've entered all the words we wanna search for. However, we can also do one more interesting thing. So we've typed in medium.

Screen Reader: Medium search, two of eight.

Ricky: And now let's press our Down Arrow a few times and see what happens.

Screen Reader: Medium rare steak search suggestion three of eight. Medium box braids search suggestion four of eight.

Ricky: So as we do this, Google is making suggestions about what we might be searching for and each of these suggestions contains the word medium. If any of these suggestions sounds interesting, we can just press Enter and it will be like we typed all those search words in ourselves. Yay, I'm Ricky Enger, and I'm glad you could spend a little time with me today, learning how to search for information online. Wanna learn more? Join me for other workshops in this series on getting online. See you next time.