Windows Narrator: Everyday Tasks

Ricky: Hello, my name is Ricky Enger, and today will learn a little about using narrator in our everyday tasks, such as navigating documents and web pages. To accomplish our tasks, will use concepts we covered in previous workshops in this series. So if you haven't checked those out yet, you'll find lots of great info in the rest of the series that will be useful for what we're doing today. When we think about the kinds of things we want to do on our computer, reading a document is definitely on that list somewhere, right? So let's check out how to use narrator to accomplish that. We've got a document open, but what is it? Let's press our narrator key plus T as in Tango, so that's Caps Lock plus T to read the title of our window.

Narrator: The picture of Dorian Gray doc docs, word window.

Ricky: So the title of our window tells us we have Microsoft Word open, and our document is the picture of Dorian Gray. Cool, and we can use the same keystroke to get the title of any of our windows that we have open. So we can read our document just by moving through it with our arrow keys. But what if we just like to sit back and listen while narrator reads it for us? We have a lovely little keystroke to do just that. So will press our narrator key, plus our down arrow key, that will start reading from our cursor position, which at this point is at the top of the document.

Narrator: Chapter One, the studio was filled with the rich odor of roses.

Ricky: And we press our Control key to stop. Now let's say that we want to read by paragraph instead of reading this entire document at once. We can do that in a couple of ways, the first is to use our narrator views, will press Control, plus narrator, plus down arrow.

Narrator: Paragraphs.

Ricky: Great, we've switched from navigating by items to navigating by paragraphs. Now, we'll press narrator plus right arrow to move forward by paragraph.

Narrator: From the corner of the diven of persian saddlebags on which he was lying--

Ricky: And we've just moved to our next paragraph, yay, but hey, what if we're using scan mode instead of navigating with narrator views? Well, our commands for reading the title of the window and reading the entire document are just the same. In fact, the only difference when using scan mode is how will navigate through our text and other controls in this window. So, will enter scan mode with narrator, plus Spacebar.

Narrator: Scan.

Ricky: And now, let's press our down arrow key.

Narrator: In the center of the room, clamped to an upright easel.

Ricky: When we stopped reading previously, we were in the middle of a sentence and now we're not. When we aren't using scan mode, our up and down arrow keys move back and forward by line. However, when we're using scan mode, these keys will actually move by paragraph. This let's us read larger chunks of text at a time without having to switch views or constantly press down arrow for each line. So then, why wouldn't we want to use scan mode all the time? Well, there are a couple of reasons for switching in and out of scan mode, first, let's say we wanted to make a note in our text here, so, we'll start typing--

Narrator: No next table, no next link, unavailable, minimize button.

Ricky: Oh, right, as we talked about in our workshop on using scan mode, these keys will actually move us around by buttons, headings and so on. We can't type in this mode, so that's one reason not to stay in scan mode all the time. Now, let's check out one more interesting thing about scan mode in a word document. To demonstrate this, will just go to a blank document.

Narrator: Document one, word window, document one editing.

Ricky: And now, let's begin pressing down arrow.

Narrator: Title bar, system, menu item, collapsed, menu key space.

Ricky: What we've just discovered here is that, once we move past any text that's in our document, will then encounter all the other controls in this window. It's neat to know that these are here, and we even have controls in this window that we'd find with our up arrow key as well, but we probably don't need them while we're just reading our document, right? So for that reason, we can turn scan mode off while we're reading our document. Okay, so now we've talked about the basics of working with a document, let's check out how narrator behaves on the web. Will use our Chrome browser today, and let's start with the NLS BARD website, where we can get lots of great books. So, we'll open this site, which is at nlsbard.loc.gov.

Narrator: Email address, edit space has finished loading.

Ricky: Okay, we hear that our page has finished loading, and then we hear email edit. Sometimes though, we may miss that part telling us what we're focused on, so let's use our narrator plus Tab shortcut to hear the item we're on.

Narrator: Email address, edit.

Ricky: Now, because we're in an edit box for typing in our email address, we're not in scan mode right now. But scan mode is really the perfect tool for exploring web pages, so let's activate it with narrator plus space.

Narrator: Scan.

Ricky: Great, now we're actually not at the top of the page at this point and we really didn't wanna miss anything important, so, let's press Control plus home to jump to the top.

Narrator: NLS BARD logo, image.

Ricky: Cool, now let's use our down arrow key and start moving through this page.

Narrator: National Library Service for the blind and print disabled downloadable books and magazines.

Narrator: BARD: Braille and audio reading download.

Narrator: Potential users.

Ricky: We could keep pressing our down arrow key all day to see what's on this page, or we could even press narrator plus down arrow to read the whole thing. It's actually really important to use one of these methods to check out a webpage we're not familiar with, because there's lots of text explaining what the page is about, what many of the controls on the page are for and so on. But will assume for now that we're familiar with this page, which lets us log into the BARD service. In our skin mode workshop, we learned that there are quicker ways to move through this page and get to the exact control or page element that we're looking for. So, will start by pressing H to move to the next heading on this page.

Narrator: No next heading.

Ricky: Okay, so this page doesn't have any headings, but on a page like a list of Google search results, for example, we'd have a heading for each of our results and we could get through them pretty quickly. Okay, so how about moving to the next link on this page, will press the letter K as in kilo.

Narrator: Link: BARD application instructions.

Ricky: Cool, there's a link to instructions for getting signed up with BARD if we aren't already, and each time we press K, will move to the next link. For any of these shortcuts, we can add a Shift to them to go back, Shift plus K for example, will move back a link. Now, when we open this page, we were placed inside an edit box to type in our email address, which is part of the process for logging into the service. How do we get back to that edit box? How about E for edit? Will press that--

Narrator: Email address, edit, press space to edit.

Ricky: So we can either press narrator plus space to exit scan mode, or simply pressing space here as narrator tells us, will deactivate scan mode so we can type in our email address. So, let's press space.

Narrator: Scan off.

Ricky: And now we're ready to type in our email address. When we're done there, we can do one of two things, we can press down arrow here, which will enter scan mode again until we find the next field in our login form or since we're inside a form, let's just press Tab and see what happens.

Narrator: Password, edit space.

Ricky: Great, we're inside our password field now and ready to type, let's Tab one more time and see what's next.

Narrator: Login button, scan.

Ricky: And hey, there's our button to login, excellent. We can get logged in, and then we can use narrator to search and browse through all these fantastic books. Narrator really does do an awesome job of making our everyday tasks go smoothly. I'm Ricky Enger and I'm glad you could spend a little time with me today learning about using narrator for everyday tasks.