Miscellaneous Reading Hotkeys Miscellaneous Reading Hotkeys: As you use applications, you will find that simply reading relative to the mouse and cursor is not enough. Window Eyes offers a great deal of options that you can use to read information. This tutorial will cover some of the more common commands. You should refer to the Window Eyes user manual for a complete list. Again, we will be using WordPad as our example application. I am sitting at the desktop with Window Eyes running under Windows Vista. I’m going to press the Windows key to bring up the start menu. WE: Start menu, start search, edit box Go ahead and type in “wordpad” now. WE: WordPad, programs group, 1 of 1. Vista found it right away and I’m going to press enter on this. WE: Document WordPad, rich text window, rich edit Let me just type in some text. “This is a test for the misc. reading hotkeys tutorial.” If you want to read what you just typed in, you can press control- numpad 5 to read the current line. Go ahead and do that. WE: This is a test for the misc. reading hotkeys tutorial. OK. A lot of these keys we have already talked about in other sections, but we kind of want to group them together in this one particular section. Remember the application help. That is a good one to bring up contact-sensitive help. Press control-shift-? now. WE: Generic control information, g, a rich edit control is similar to an edit box in that it is a rectangular area that contains…(silenced) This brought up the contact-sensitive help for WordPad. Now we don’t have any default text for this, so what came up was generic information for a rich edit. It is telling you how you can interact inside of a rich edit. So even though it is in WordPad, a rich edit is still a rich edit. It is just telling you how you can navigate around and use some keystrokes to do that. The nice thing about the application help, if you remember from previous sections, is that I can actually change some of the text. If I wanted to give WordPad some help, I can press shift-tab back one time… WE: Help applies to application, a, radio button checked, 3 of 3 This says help applies to, and in my case, it said application. I’m on 3 of 3 as far as the radio buttons go. If I were to type in some text, and shift-tab one more time, this would allow me to type in text. That text can be relative to the application that I’m in, relative to the dialog that I’m in, or it can be relative to the control that I am in. I could set that up as well. So if I wanted to do it only when the WordPad edit box had focus, I would select control. If I were in the font dialog and wanted focus on that, then I would select dialog. Or I could have it set for application, so it would bring that help up no matter where I was in the application. When Window Eyes is requested to bring up the application help dialog, it first looks to see if there is specific help content for the control I am in. If there isn’t a control help information typed specifically for the control that has focus, then it looks for the dialog that has focus to see if there is help for that. If there is, it will use that. If it doesn’t have that, then it will look for help for the application. This allows you to go in and define the help the way that you want it or refine the help the way that you want it. In my case, I’m going to leave it at the application level, but I’m going to shift-tab once more to go to the edit box. WE: Application information, I edit box. This is where it allows me to type in some information. I can add in, “Don’t forget about read-to-end, control-shift-r.” Press control-numpad 5 to read that line again. WE: Don’t forget about read-to-end, control-shift-r. This is a way to store a hotkey that you might otherwise forget. You can put it in this contact-sensitive help, and it would be there for you whenever you need it. Control-shift-? is the hotkey for the contact-sensitive help. Also, when I talked about those 3 radio buttons, you can switch between those 3 radio buttons at any time. Even though you bring it up in a control that did have specific help, you could still go down to the radio button and move to the dialog help or the application help. I’m going to go ahead and leave it at the application help. Press enter because “save” is my default button in this dialog. I could verify that by pressing the “delete” key on the numeric keypad. Press that now. WE: Default, save s, button So the default button is “save,” which means if I press enter, it would save the settings. Now actually, here is a good case where that doesn’t work. I just thought of that as I was about to press enter. It seems that when you are using computers, there is never a 100% rule that works all of the time. I’m inside of an edit box where I could type text. Well part of what I can type is an enter key. So if I were to hit enter, even though “save” is the default button of this dialog, “enter” is actually being used by the focused control, allowing me to put a blank line in my text. So I can’t actually press “enter” right there. I could press alt-s, because “s” is the shortcut to save, or I could tab out. Now tab is the exception to the rule when I am inside of an edit box. It doesn’t actually put the tab inside the edit box, but will take me out of the edit box. So to click on “save,” I could keep pressing tab until I get there, or I could press tab one time to get out of the edit box and then press enter, or I could just press alt-s at any point, and that will save it as well. Press alt-s now. WE: Document, WordPad, rich text window (silenced) I am back inside my WordPad window. To bring up that help again, press control-shift-? now. WE: Dialog, application help, application information I, Don’t forget about read-to-end, control-shift-r, edit box It put me right back in this edit box for this help and it read me that information. The generic rich edit control information that we heard before is still there, but we just have to tab down to it. It just recognized that I had some contact-sensitive help specific to the application and it brought that up for me by default. That just shows you how powerful this help application dialog really is. We hope that you will actually refine it to make notes and things like that for you in certain parts of your application. Let me escape out of the help now to go back to WordPad. WE: Document, WordPad, rich text (silenced) Another good keystroke that you want to remember is the key describer. If you are sitting inside of an application and you cannot remember what your keyboard layout is or what a Window Eyes command is, you can actually go into a key describer mode, which basically freezes your keyboard, except for system commands. A system command would be like control-escape to bring up the start menu, or control-alt-w, which is a system shortcut to launch Window Eyes. Those system commands are not being over-ridden by Window Eyes, but the application commands are being over-ridden and Window Eyes itself is being over-ridden. To get into the key describer mode, press insert-one on the top of the keyboard. Press insert-1 now. WE: Key describer on It says, “Key describer on.” At this point, I am basically safe, other than they system keys that I talked about, or alt-tab is one of the system keys that we don’t block. Alt-tab will actually take activation away from where you are. If we see that there is a focus change or an activation change of some sort, then we also take you out of key describer mode automatically. This is just to keep you from getting too confused, so we are locking the keyboard. Inside of WordPad now, I can just press keys. I’m going to type in some letters. WE: a, b, c, d, e It is not putting that text inside of my document because I am in key describer mode. All it is doing is saying what the key does. Press any key now and it will just pronounce it. WE: Escape, F12, insert, caps on, caps off The “caps lock” key is a system key that actually did its job. It turned caps on and off. All of the other keys are going to remain dormant as you press them, other than the Windows key, which brings up the start menu, and a few others. But I could tap the control key. WE: Control Tap the shift key. WE: Shift That is just reading the keys. Now let me tap a key that we just heard about. Press control-shift-? now. WE: control, shift, question…Application help, accesses help for the current focused window. This help can be changed by the user. Now there what it told me was the keystroke that I was pressing and that it was the application help. It also gave me a short description of what that particular function does. So let’s look at some other keys. Reading relative to the cursor was control-numpad left arrow. That would read the current character under the cursor. Press that now. WE: control, left arrow. Character, voices the character containing the cursor. If you press this key twice in a row, the character is pronounced phonetically in the speech rate two settings below the screen voice rate. And there you go. Remember, we did control-numpad 5 to read the current line. 5 is the center of the numeric keypad. Press that now. WE: control, center. Line, voices the line containing the cursor. If no cursor is present, performs a speak summary. Control-shift-b was the mouse boundary. We talked about how to read relative to the mouse. Press control-shift-b now. WE: control, shift, b. Mouse boundary rotor. Rotors between areas of the screen that the mouse has access. That is an excellent way to get a quick description of what a hotkey is. To get out of key describer mode, you need to press the keystroke again. Press insert-1 again. WE: insert, 1, key describer off Now key describer is back off. The next hotkey that we want to talk about is called speak summary, and again we have used this in a couple places, but if I press control-shift-s, it will do a speak summary. Press control-shift-s now. WE: Rich text window. This is a test for the misc. reading hotkeys tutorial. So this just tells us where we are and the contents of that. If I am on a button, it will tell me about the button. If I am in a list view, it will speak to me the item that is currently selected. It is a summary of where you are at. So if you walk up to a machine cold, this is one of the hotkeys that you might want to press. If you have a cursor moving around inside of a word processor, control-numpad 5 will read the line under the cursor. Now if there isn’t a cursor, it will immediately do what a control-shift-s would have done. It will do the same thing as the speak summary. The reason that we have done this is that we want to have one keystroke that will read you the line if there is a cursor, or if there is not a cursor, to go ahead and do a speak summary. So we recommend control-numpad 5 be a key that you become very familiar with. Another nice keystroke that is worth remembering, especially if you have message boxes that are popping up, is control-shift-w. This will read the active window contents. It will read all of the window, top to bottom and left to right. Typically this is used to read a message box, but I am sitting inside WordPad now, so I’ll press control-shift-w now. WE: Document WordPad, file f pull down, edit e pull down, view v pull down, insert I pull down, format, o pull down, help h pull down, Arial 10, Western 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7. This is a test for the misc. reading hotkeys tutorial. Press F1 What it did there was it actually read all of the contents that was inside WordPad window, regardless if my WordPad window was maximized or not. You heard the menu bar going across, Arial 10, Western which is up in the tool bar; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, which is a ruler in the tool bar; then you heard the contents that had been typed in; then you heard for help to press F1, which was the status line at the bottom of the window. Again, if I am in a dialog box, press control-shift-w to read the active window. If you want to hear the title bar of the active window, press control-shift-t. Now remember, when I pressed control-shift-w that will do it, too, because it starts reading the window from the top. The title bar is always at the top. Press control-shift-t to read the title and status of my active window. WE: Document WordPad maximized It said, “Document WordPad,” which is the title that I visually see up there at the top of my active window. It also said maximized, which is telling me that WordPad window is taking up the full contents of my computer screen. That is actually a good thing. Screen readers, initially anyway, all they could do was read text from the screen. That is how they got their name initially. They are a lot smarter now, and they can actually read information that is not visible now. But there are still a lot of cases where it can only read what is being displayed on the screen. So it is a good idea to make sure that your applications are always maximized so that you have the maximum amount of content being displayed on the screen. Sighted users sometimes like to have the windows be smaller so that they can have more windows open at the same time, and they can visually look between the applications. From a blind perspective, it is not an advantage to do that, because typically what you would so is you would just change activation to that window, so you might as well just leave that window maximized. That way you can be alt-tabbing between maximized windows. Now to show you how to maximize or restore your windows, most applications are going to have a system pull down menu. The quickest way to open up that system pull down menu is to hold down the alt key and press the space bar. Now again, this is typically an application keystroke that all applications will use. But remember, there is no rule that is 100% true all of time with Windows. Go ahead and hold down the alt key and tap the space bar. WE: Space, system pull down, restore r It said, “System pull down,” because that is the type of menu that I am in. The first item that it highlights is restore. If I hit enter on restore, it will take me from being maximized to the position it was prior to being maximized. Move down one with the down arrow key. WE: Move, m disabled This allows me to move a window around on the screen, but since it is maximized, it is disabled and cannot be moved. It is already taking up the full contents of the screen. Down again. WE: Size, s disabled This lets you size the screen from the keyboard. This is a nice accessibility thing that Microsoft added. A sighted user most likely will not use these options, because they will use the mouse to drag the window around to move it, or they will use the mouse to grab one of the sides and then resize the screen. When we were talking about the mouse pointer and how we read the mouse pointer icon that it changes to, they would go until they get to a sizing arrow of some sort and then drag the window around to size it. Down arrow again. WE: Minimize, n Minimize actually takes the application and puts it down on the taskbar. That way it just gets it out of view and puts it down on the taskbar, completely out of view. It is still running, just out of view. Down arrow again. WE: Maximize, x disabled Maximized will make the application take up the entire screen. This option is disabled now because it is already maximized. Down arrow again. WE: Close, c alt-F4 Alt-F4 will close the application. If you were to press enter here, it would close the application. Down arrow one more time. WE: Restore, r That wrapped me around back to the top and put me back on the restore option. Press enter on this. WE: Menu closed, rich text window, This is a test for the ….(silenced) Visually, the WordPad window is not taking up the entire screen. Icons from my desktop can now be seen because WordPad and Window Eyes are the only two applications that I am currently running. Window Eyes is minimized to the taskbar, and all that I have behind WordPad now is my desktop. Let’s go ahead and read the current title bar now by pressing control-shift-t. WE: Document WordPad, normal It says, “Document WordPad, normal.” That means that it is not maximized. So if something is not reading quite right for you, it might be because the application is not maximized. So I’m going to go ahead and maximize this with alt-spacebar. WE: Space, restore, r disabled It starts me at restore, but it is disabled because it is already in the restored state. Press “x” to maximize the screen. WE: X, menu closed. Rich text window (silenced) This said, “Menu closed,” and put me back in the rich edit box and started reading that. I can verify that by pressing control-shift-t. WE: Document WordPad, maximized Another hotkey that I would like to talk about is the status line hotkey. Most applications do have a status line typically located at the bottom of the application. Window Eyes has a command called a status line, control-insert-s that will, if a window is designated as being a status window, Window Eyes will find it no matter where it is. Sometimes the status line isn’t the last line on your window. It could be somewhere else, and if it is tagged as a status window, Window Eyes will automatically find it and read its’ content. If there are more than one status windows, Window Eyes will find them all and read them. Now if it doesn’t find a status window, then it is just going to assume that the last line in your window is the status line, and that is what it is going to read. That is the case in WordPad. It does not have a window marked as a status, but it does have what is referred to as a status line at the bottom of the window. It just happens to be text that they put down there. Go ahead and press control-insert-s now. WE: For help, press F1. It said, “For help, press F1.” Now that is exactly what is down at the bottom on my status line inside WordPad. So it is a very quick way of finding out what the status line is for your particular application. We also talked about the reading marked block hotkey. Go ahead and select a word using control-shift-left arrow. WE: tutorial, selected If I want to read what I have selected, press control-shift-m for marked block. WE: Tutorial It just reads it. So that is a great key, especially as you are selecting text. We also have two more hotkeys that make more sense when I am inside a dialog. Those hotkeys are for field name and field data. So I’m going to go ahead and go into my WordPad format menu by press the alt key and then the “o” key. Press enter on “font.” WE: Font dialog. Menu closed, dialog. Font, font f, Arial 39 of 274. Combo edit box. There are a lot of fonts there. If I wanted to change the font of the word “tutorial,” I could do that in this box. I am sitting in the font edit box, allowing me to type in a font, or up and down arrow through the list of fonts. Press the down arrow once. WE: Arial black, 40 of 274 Up arrow now. WE: Arial, 39 of 274 So I am on Arial, which is 39 of 274,but let’s say that I want to hear this content without actually arrowing. I would like to read the field name that I’m on, which right now is the font. Arial is the field data. So if I want to read the field name, I would press control-shift-n for name. Do that now. WE: Font f, Arial So it just tells me that I’m in font, and Arial is part of the field name as well. I’m going to control-shift-d to get the field data. WE: Arial, Arial It just reads Arial. It reads it twice, because in this particular case, I have an edit box with Arial, and right below that I have a list box with Arial. Let me tab over to a button to show you how these work. Tab a few times. WE: Effects, strikeout, k checkbox unchecked Ok, so we are on a checkbox now, so let me do those here now. Press control-shift-n. WE: Effects Now control-shift-d. WE: Strikeout, checkbox unchecked So in this case, the field name was effects, and the field data was strikeout. In a checkbox it works that way. It just depends on the control. Let’s go ahead and move to a button now. Tab a few times. WE: Ok, button I’m on the “ok” button. I just hit tab several times to get to ok. Press control-shift-n now. WE: (ding) Nothing. Now press control-shift-d. WE: Ok button So on the control-shift-n, there actually isn’t a field name. That is why there was a little “ding.” Control-shift-d is actually the button text. It is the data of the button, which is the button name. So those are also some good keys, control-shift-n for field name, and control-shift-d for field data. Go ahead and press escape to get out of this dialog. WE: Document, WordPad (silenced) I am back inside the WordPad document now. Another key that you might find useful is the time and date. Go ahead and press insert-t now. WE: 12:04 pm Sunday, September 14, 2008 It is just a quick time and date. This uses your system settings to automatically read the text that you have your system set up to. So no matter what region you are in or how you like to hear your time and date, it is going to go to the operating system and find out your preferred settings for your region, and it will read the time and date the way that you have it set up. That key press can be pressed at anytime. It is a great way to get the time and date. Another keystroke that is very nice, especially if you are using laptops, is one that will give you the battery level of your system. Now I could go down to the system tray and move around to the battery status to find it. I could also press insert-q, which is the default keystroke. If you are using a desktop computer, then this keystroke will be of no use to you, because you are not using a battery. But go ahead and press insert-q if you are using a laptop. WE: Estimated battery charge, 95%, charging So it said that the battery was charged at 95% and is currently charging. Again, my battery is dead because I have had it plugged in for so long that it is not able to charge to 100% anymore. If this laptop was unplugged and it was draining down, then I could just hit that constantly and very quickly get the battery level. Sighted people may or may not have the advantage of just looking down at the system tray very quickly, and they can get a little bar that tells them about how full their charge is at that point. This is just a great way to be able to get that. The final keystroke that I want to talk about is the bypass key press. That keystroke is insert-b. Bypass is just used if you have a Window Eyes hotkey that is colliding with your application key press. In my case, since I am inside WordPad, we don’t have that. But let’s just pretend that control-shift-t, which reads the title bar, also has a functionality inside WordPad, meaning if I weren’t running Window Eyes, then control-shift-t would do a function in WordPad. Well if I have Window Eyes running inside WordPad, and I press control-shift-t, Window Eyes will typically win that battle, meaning Window Eyes will see the key press before the application. That is the point of a hotkey. So if I were to hit control-shift-t, Window Eyes would always read WordPad’s title. But if I actually wanted WordPad to see control-shift-t, you could go inside and change the hotkey, which we showed you earlier when we were talking about the menu options of the hotkey dialog, or you can press the bypass key. So if you press insert-b for bypass….press that now. WE: bypass Now press control-shift-t. WE: t It just said, “t.” It said this because it is no longer a Window Eyes hotkey, it was a WordPad keystroke. But in this case, WordPad doesn’t do anything with control-shift-t. But if it did, it would have done its thing. So it is a great way to temporarily bypass. You can always rename the hotkeys to be other keystrokes, so that they don’t collide at all. There are many, many more hotkeys that you may find useful in your usage of your computer and Window Eyes. These are just some of the highlights of the keystrokes that we think are most commonly used, and so we felt that it deserved a tutorial section on its own. But please read through the entire Window Eyes manual on the section of hotkeys to go through all of the hotkeys that are available to you. Some of those hotkeys are going to be relevant in other applications, while some may be relevant all of the time. Some you may not care about at all. We obviously have to work with all users and all applications. There is a wealth of keystrokes to be able to read information quickly at your touch. The manual is the source for that. Let’s move on to the next section.