Assistive Technology

Knowing where you are on the wonderful worldwideweb

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Have you ever been browsing a website & came across a text field where you wanted to enter data or maybe even filling out a form to sign-up for an event or website account, such as Facebook?

I have & often times, I’ll get “lost in the page” & forget what my screen-reader just said.

If you’ve ever found yourself in this situation, I’m happy to inform you that there is in fact, a solution & it’s extremely easy to accomplish.

To find out where your focus is, simply press insert+tab & you’ll be told the name of the field which currently has focus.

As always, if you find these tips helpful, please feel free to like, comment, share & subscribe.

Stay tuned for more!

If you have feedback or find an error, please notify me using the information on the “Contact us” page.

A Quick & easy way to check laptop battery status

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As you use your laptop computer throughout the day, its battery will drain.

This is especially true if you’re using it on battery power.

This information may come in handy if you’re working somewhere where there are limited outlets.

I was browsing the web recently & came across a very handy shortcut which allows you to hear the status of your laptop battery.

To check the battery of your laptop as a jaws user, press Capslock+shift+b

I hope this post helps you get the most from your laptop battery.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to leave a comment & I would be more than happy to assist you.

“Marking the Spot: Navigating the Digital World with JAWS Place markers”

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For readers who may be unfamiliar, JAWS is a screenreader, which has existed since the early 1990’s. JAWS stands for “Job Access With Speech.”

A screen-reader speaks the contents of the computer screen for users like myself, who are blind or visually impaired.

In Jaws version 5, a brand-new feature was introduced.

This feature is called”Place markers.”

You can use this feature in applications such as Microsoft Word & Outlook, as well as on the web.

You can set both temporary & permanent place-markers.

Temporary place markers are only available while you’re viewing the document, email message or webpage where the place marker was set. Once you shutdown or restart your computer, all temporary place-markers will disappear.

Permanent place-markers, on the other hand, are always available.

I use this feature a lot, especially, on websites such as Facebook, where it is often difficult for me to find the beginning of my newsfeed.

To create a Temporary place marker, press Control+Windows+k.

You can set a permanent place marker with Control+Shift+K. This same keystroke also allows you to add new place-markers as well as remove old ones you may no longer need.

Jaws can speak a list of place markers on a given page. To try this out, press Alt+Windows+k.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment. Also, feel free to subscribe for future content updates.

An easy way to navigate through messages in Outlook

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Recently, I was going through my email, when I discovered that there is a much easier way to quickly navigate between messages rather than pressing escape to exit your current message and using arrow keys to move up and down through the list.

That much easier way is to simply press control+, to move back through messages and control+. to move forward.

I’ve been using these commands daily for about a month now and they’re definitely a huge timesaver!

As always, if you need assistance with anything I’ve posted or you have questions, please leave a comment and I’d be more than happy to assist you.

An easy way to change the volume of running apps

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Have you ever ben listening to music or a podcast, while you work on your computer using either JAWS or NVDA & wished you could change the volume quickly?

Well now, you can, thanks to this handy tip I saw on Mastodon last night, which comes from @ivanjc@tweesecake.social

He wrote, “

“I just found a cool command in windows 11.
Control+windows+V will bring up a quick settings screen, in which you can change volumes for running apps!
Kind of like running the old-style mixer, but with a modern twist.”

I tested this command myself, shortly after seeing it, and it works brilliantly.

If Jaws won’t increase speech rate while reading, what do I do?

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Recently, while working on this Lenovo Yoga laptop, I was reading something & wanted to increase the speaking rate of jaws permanently.

I remember being taught that the command to do this is control+Alt+page up, which is a tricky command, since my computer doesn’t have the “6-pack.”

So, what do I do?

Well, I could use Control+alt+fn+up arrow, but that didn’t work either.

What’s weird, is that doing control+alt+function+down arrow, to decrease works just fine.

The workaround for anyone else in this situation, which actually works consistently, is to disable numlock & press control+alt+fn+either numpad 9 to increase or numpad 3 to decrease.

If you have any questions, or need assistance with this, please leave a comment & I’d be more than happy to assist you.

How do I send a tab from one device to another?

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Recently, I was working in my web browser on my computer & needed to leave to go somewhere.

But, I didn’t want to lose what I was looking at.

So, I sent the tab from my computer to my iPhone.

To perform the following steps, you’ll need Edge installed on all the devices you plan to use. It even works on Linux!

To send a tab to another device:

1. Press either alt+d or control+L to bring focus to the address bar.

2. Tab once. If your screen-reader says something about previous searches, remove them all, by tabbing then pressing enter until they’re all gone. (THE “send page” option & toolbar in general, won’t show up, until you do.)

3. Find the “send page” option & click it.

4. Choose the device you’d like to send the page to & there you go!

If you have any questions/issues, please comment & I’d be more than happy to assist you.

If Voiceover refuses to say the word “search”

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If you’re a Voiceover user & your device is running ios 17.1.1 or newer, you may have run into an issue, where Voiceover loses its label for this button.

When I had this issue, voiceover would just say, “button” when encountering the search tab of the following applications. Mona, Which is a third-party mastodon app, the App Store and Apple podcasts.

To work around this, I labeled the button by doing the following. Note: you only need to do this once and it will work everywhere, this bug has appeared.

  1. Triple tap one of the applications listed above.

  2. 2. Activate the search button and perform a two finger triple tap and hold. This is the label element command.

  3. 3. In the field that comes up, type the word search and press return.