Useful Shortcuts

[Ricky] Hi, I am Ricky Enger and today we're gonna learn a few NVDA shortcuts that will help us get exactly the info we need right when we need it. In previous workshops in this series, we've talked about modifier keys, including the NVDA key.

We'll be using modifiers for what we're doing today. So if you're not yet familiar with those, check out the first couple of workshops in this series to get up to speed. So when we think about what a screen reader is the simple explanation is that it reads what's on our screen right?

When we break it down a little further though, we find out it's not exactly like that. There's actually a lot of info on the screen, and we don't really need all that info all the time. We need a way to ask our screen reader to just focus on the specific info we need, and that's where our shortcut keys come in.

Now, we've already talked in previous workshops about using our control key by itself, to tell the screen reader to stop talking. That's a shortcut we're gonna use a lot. Here's another one that's gonna come in really handy. Let's find out what time it is. To do that, we'll use our NVDA key which again is our insert key or our caps lock key, and we'll press F 12.

[Screen Reader] 1:39 PM.

[Ricky] And there we go. We heard our time. Now we'll use the same shortcut key, only this time we're gonna press our F 12 key twice quickly. So here we go. We've got our NVDA key and now we'll just tap, tap on our F 12 key

[Screen Reader] Monday, May 8th, 2023.

[Ricky] Yep. We heard a bit of our time info, but because we pressed F 12 again, NVDA did something a little different. We heard the date. Nice. Alright, we know what time and day it is, which is a really good start, but maybe it's been a day full of distractions and we've forgotten what we were doing on the computer. It would be really helpful to know which window we're in. Right? We can find that out with another lovely little shortcut key. We'll use our NVDA key and press T for title.

[Screen Reader] Recently added books and magazines.

[Ricky] Okay, cool. We're checking out the most recently added books and magazines inside our Bard Express app, which is where we can browse and download audio books. Good to know. We can have more than one thing open on our computer at once though. So we need a shortcut key that's gonna let us switch between open items. This shortcut works whether we're using a screen reader or not. So this time our modifier key is ALT, instead of our NVDA key. Let's hold that down and now we'll press our tab key. Something is gonna happen and when it does, let's not release our alt key just yet. So here we go. Alt plus tab.

[Screen Reader] Hadley vision resources. 100 years of empowering adults with vision Lost Google Chrome. Row one column two.

[Ricky] Yep. Here we have a browser open and we're on the Hadley website. Now if we let go of our alt key here, we're going to switch to this window. Let's say we wanna see what other windows are open though. So with our alt key down let's tap our tab key one more time.

[Screen Reader] Alice's Adventures in wonderland.docs Word column three.

[Ricky] Yeah. Here we have a Microsoft Word document with a great little story. So let's go ahead and switch to this window. All we have to do is just let go of our alt key here.

[Screen Reader] Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Doc's word, Microsoft Word document. Edit multi-line. Page one, section one, chapter I.

[Ricky] Yep. That did it. We've now switched to our word document. Great. Well now that we're here, seems like the next step is to start reading the story. We can use our arrow keys to move through this document, line by line and we'll check that out in just a bit. For now, let's say we wanna just start reading everything, starting from where we happen to be in the document. For this, let's use our NVDA key and now we'll press down arrow.

[Screen Reader] Chapter I down the rabbit hole. Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do. Once or twice, she had peeped into the book her sister was reading but it had no pictures or conversations in it. And what is the use of a book thought Alice, without pictures or conversations

[Ricky] And we'll use our control key to stop. So yeah, when we use this shortcut key NVDA will just keep reading until we tell it to stop. This is really convenient when we wanna read a story like this or an article on a website, that kind of thing. So now let's check out how to read by line and we're just going to use our arrow keys by themselves to do that. So let's first go down a line with our down arrow key.

[Screen Reader] Once or twice she had peeped into the book, conversations in it and what is blank? So she was considering in her own mind as well as she could for the hot day, made her feel very sleepy.

[Ricky] Okay, so there's our next line and if we wanna go the other direction, we'll just use our up arrow key. But what if we need to hear our current line again, because we didn't quite get it the first time. To repeat our current line let's press our NVDA key and then we'll press up arrow.

- So she was considering in her own mind as well as she could for the hot day, made her feel very sleepy.

[Ricky] Yeah, that's our current line. Okay, we've done a lot today. Just two more quick things before we go. Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to just press different keys on our keyboard without actually doing anything? Turns out there's a shortcut key for that. It's called input help. And when we turn this on, it's going to speak whatever key or combination of keys we press, and it'll tell us what those keys do. So let's turn it on by holding down our NVDA key and then we'll press the number one.

[Screen Reader] Input help on.

[Ricky] Okay, great. Now let's just press a few letters.

[Screen Reader] A, B, C, D, E.

[Ricky] Alright, great. NVDA is speaking each letter as we type it, without actually typing the letter. So if we press our alt key.

[Screen Reader] Left, ALT

[Ricky] NVDA speaks that as well. So let's try pressing a shortcut key we learned today and see what happens. We'll press our NVDA plus F12 shortcut.

[Screen Reader] NVDA plus F 12, if pressed once, reports the current time. If pressed twice, reports the current date.

[Ricky] Awesome. This mode is really useful, both to remind us what we've already learned and to discover new shortcuts. When we're ready to turn input help off, we'll just press our NVDA key plus the number one again. Before we do that, there's one last important keystroke that we should know. Let's press NVDA, plus the letter Q and see what input help tells us.

[Screen Reader] NVDA plus Q quits NVDA.

[Ricky] Ah, so that's how we'll turn NVDA off, if we ever need to do that. NVDA plus Q, Q for quit. Let's turn off our input help mode with NVDA plus one.

[Screen Reader] NVDA plus one input help off.

[Ricky] Nice. We're back in our Word document, which is a great place to practice all the new things we discovered today. I'm Ricky Enger, and I'm glad you could spend a little time with me learning about NVDA shortcuts. See you next time.