Windows Narrator: Views

Ricky: Hello, my name is Ricky Enger, and today we'll learn about navigating with Narrator Views. Okay, most of that sentence may not even make sense right now. But it will by the end of this workshop. Narrator is really powerful, and it actually has two methods of navigating around and reading what's on the screen.

There's Narrator Views, which we'll talk about today, and there's also Scan mode. Scan mode has its own lovely little workshop that you can check out as well. For now, though, what in the world are Narrator Views and how do we navigate with them? To answer that, we first need to talk about a key on our keyboard that's kind of lonely, because we don't use it that often. It's the Caps Lock key. But while we're using Narrator, this key gets a cool new function.

We call it the Narrator key. And when we hold it down and press another key along with it, we can do some really useful things. So let's check out how that works. Right now, we're inside our Narrator Settings window, which we opened either from our Narrator Home window or by pressing Control plus Windows plus N.

Narrator: Turn on Narrator, toggle switch on.

Ricky: Okay, there's our first option in this window. Now, to move to the next item here, we'll hold down our Caps Lock, or Narrator key, and press our right arrow.

Narrator: Link, open Narrator home.

Ricky: Awesome, we've just moved to the next item in our Settings window. Not only that, we've just navigated using a Narrator view called Items, which moves us from one item to the next in our window. Now, items can be links, buttons, or other controls. But they can also be blocks of text. So when we're moving by items, we're basically moving through every single thing in our window, one item at a time. So let's try this again, only we'll move backward. To do that, we'll use our Narrator key, and this time we'll press our left arrow.

Narrator: Turn on Narrator, toggle switch on.

Ricky: Cool, we moved back to our previous item. Now, moving by items is nice, but maybe there are times we need to navigate a little differently. So to do that, we'll switch views. Narrator makes us work for this one a little bit, because we'll be pressing not one, not two, but three keystrokes at once. We'll use our Narrator key, of course, and we'll add the Control key to it. Now that we've got those two keys held down, let's press down arrow.

Narrator: Paragraphs.

Ricky: Yay, we just switched our Narrator view to Paragraphs. What this actually means is that now when we use our Narrator plus left arrow and Narrator plus right arrow keystrokes, we'll move by paragraphs instead of items. Let's go through a few more of these views with our Narrator plus Control plus down arrow key. To make this easier for us, we can just keep holding down our Control and Narrator keys, and we'll just press and release down arrow to continue moving forward through our views. So let's see what we've got here.

Narrator: Sentences, lines, words.

Ricky: Okay, let's stop here and check out how this works. We'll hold down our Narrator key and we'll just press our right arrow a few times.

Narrator: On, Narrator, link open, Narrator, Home, link, view.

Ricky: Hey, we selected the Words view and now we're moving forward by word, nice. Now, if we want to move back to our Items view, we can use our Narrator plus Control keys, and then we use our up arrow to move back to it. However, we've got lots more views that we haven't even discovered yet. So let's use our Control plus Narrator plus down arrow hotkey to move through the rest of them.

Narrator: Characters, Tables, Links, Headings, Landmarks, Form Fields, Items.

Ricky: And there were are, navigating by items again. Pretty powerful stuff, right? We can decide how we want to move through our window, select the view, and then navigate with our Narrator plus left arrow and Narrator plus right arrow keys. Let's do two more really useful things before we go. First, we moved around a lot in this window, which means we may have no idea what we're focused on right now. We can find that out just by holding our Narrator key and pressing Tab, which is right above it.

Narrator: Link, View the complete guide to Narrator online.

Ricky: All right, so that's where we are in our window. Great to know. The Narrator Guide has so much useful information in it. So let's go ahead and open it. To do that, we'll use our Narrator key, and this time we'll press Enter.

Narrator: Complete guide to Narrator, Windows Help, Google Chrome pane, Complete guide to Narrator, Windows Help.

Ricky: Now, a couple of things happened here. Our Narrator Guide opened, which is exactly what we wanted to do. We also heard a little sound cue when we pressed our keystroke, just letting us know that we activated the item we were on. That's going to work on all sorts of items, such as buttons, links, and check boxes. And we'll always get that nice sound as an added indicator that we've activated something. So with our Narrator key and Narrator Views, we can do so many great things, not only in our Settings window, but as we navigate the rest of the apps on our computer as well. I'm Ricky Enger, and I'm glad you could spend a little time with me today learning about navigating with Narrator Views.