Blind and Visually Impaired Community
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Quick Question on Screen Readers (self.Blind)
submitted by claudettemonet
So I want to start playing around with a screen reader. I have a laptop. It is an HP, so not a mac. I want to be able to read pdf documents, word documents and websites. Are those going to be all separate programs or is there one that can do all of that?
Thanks, guys!!!
-Claudette
edit for typos
Thanks, guys!!!
-Claudette
edit for typos
claudettemonet [OP] 1 points 7y ago
Hello all! I downloaded NVDA. I changed the voice to Hazel. Haha.
ColonelMiltonBlows 1 points 7y ago
If you're using Adobe Reader for PDFs $1 is free and should work for you. Be warned though, the default voice is pretty terrible. If you're running Windows 8 or above you have some pretty decent built-in voices to choose from; click the NVDA icon in the system tray and under Preferences choose Synthesizer, then SAPI5. Hope that helps.
claudettemonet [OP] 1 points 7y ago
Thanks!
fastfinge 1 points 7y ago
To add to that answer: If you're using NVDA, you need to be on Firefox or Chrome. Don't bother with Internet Explorer or Microsoft Edge. Firefox is best right now, but I'm running beta versions of Chrome, and it's catching up quickly; I suspect they'll offer equal access in a few months.
Nighthawk321 1 points 7y ago
I'm actually glad to hear that, I've always wanted to use Crome.
fastfinge 1 points 7y ago
If you get Google Chrome Canary, you can try it out right now! Everything works as well as in Firefox, with three issues. First off, when you delete things in a text box, NVDA doesn't announce the characters you deleted. Secondly, NVDA doesn't read spelling errors in edit boxes. Third, websites that use frames entirely don't work. IFrames work fine, but if the entire site is in frames, Chrome will just read you the names of the various frames, and not the contents. Other than those issues though, that I'm told Google and NVDA are aware of and working to solve, Chrome works as well as Firefox. I have no idea when these changes are coming to stable Chrome releases, though.
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