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Windows Narrator Quickstart Guide wrong on page 1 (self.Blind)
submitted by AtaraxyConsulting
I am trying to use Windows Narrator to check a website I am building for screen reader accessibility, and learning how to use it is pure pain.
I have gotten stuck on page 1 of the Quickstart guide: Welcome to Narrator Quickstart (1/13).
It clearly says "To stop reading, press 'ctrl.' If I press the control button, it does indeed stop reading.
Then it says, clearly, in the very next sentence, "Then, use the up and down arrow keys to keep reading from where Narrator left off."
When I press the down arrow key, it does not keep reading from where narrator left off. Instead, when I press the down arrow key, it says 'down arrow.' When I press the up arrow key, it says 'up arrow.'
Seems pretty bogus to me when the tutorial instructions I get the very first time I open up Narrator are wrong.
Does anyone here use Narrator, and know what is going on?
The rest of this post is detailing my descent into trying keyboard shortcuts to figure out what is going on, and nothing appearing to work like I expect, so if you want to you can skip the next several paragraphs of my tests and theories.
My mental model of how a screen reader works is that it tries to turn everything on the screen into a podcast. A podcast is one verbal line, from beginning to end, and you can listen to it all the way through, pause it, skip backward, and skip forward.
Since my mental model is a podcast, the first thing I am trying to figure out is how to pause the podcast and how to get the podcast to 1) start playing again and 2) start playing where I left off.
I have figured out how to stop, but so far I have completely failed to figure out how to get it to start playing again where I left off.
All of this is happening while I am in the Narrator quickstart tutorial, which you would think would be the one place where stuff actually works.
Pressing ctrl stops narration.
Pressing down arrow makes it say 'down arrow.'
Pressing up arrow makes it say 'up arrow."Pressing capslock + down arrow will start reading, but not always where I left off, and only reads until the end of the line I am currently on. It does not continue reading.
I did google $1 and found the commands list.
I have gotten stuck on page 1 of the Quickstart guide: Welcome to Narrator Quickstart (1/13).
It clearly says "To stop reading, press 'ctrl.' If I press the control button, it does indeed stop reading.
Then it says, clearly, in the very next sentence, "Then, use the up and down arrow keys to keep reading from where Narrator left off."
When I press the down arrow key, it does not keep reading from where narrator left off. Instead, when I press the down arrow key, it says 'down arrow.' When I press the up arrow key, it says 'up arrow.'
Seems pretty bogus to me when the tutorial instructions I get the very first time I open up Narrator are wrong.
Does anyone here use Narrator, and know what is going on?
The rest of this post is detailing my descent into trying keyboard shortcuts to figure out what is going on, and nothing appearing to work like I expect, so if you want to you can skip the next several paragraphs of my tests and theories.
My mental model of how a screen reader works is that it tries to turn everything on the screen into a podcast. A podcast is one verbal line, from beginning to end, and you can listen to it all the way through, pause it, skip backward, and skip forward.
Since my mental model is a podcast, the first thing I am trying to figure out is how to pause the podcast and how to get the podcast to 1) start playing again and 2) start playing where I left off.
I have figured out how to stop, but so far I have completely failed to figure out how to get it to start playing again where I left off.
All of this is happening while I am in the Narrator quickstart tutorial, which you would think would be the one place where stuff actually works.
Pressing ctrl stops narration.
Pressing down arrow makes it say 'down arrow.'
Pressing up arrow makes it say 'up arrow."Pressing capslock + down arrow will start reading, but not always where I left off, and only reads until the end of the line I am currently on. It does not continue reading.
I did google $1 and found the commands list.
bradley22 2 points 1y ago
I just tried the narrator tutorial and it works fine for me.
can you make a recording of you going through the first page just so we can here what's going on?
Another thing you might want to try is pressing Narrator key, capslock plus space and seeing if you can arrow through the instructions that way.
As for your podcast idea, that's not how screen readers work. Yes you can stop speech with control but you can't then keep going from where you left off apart from with NVDA. TO do that you use the shift key like playing and pausing with a podcast but i'm sorry to say that's where the similarities end.
Screen readers have shortcuts for everything from skipping around a webpage, to using the windows/map/phone desktops/launchers/home screens.
You could try NVDA from NVaccess.org which is also free and for windows but you'll probably want to change the voice.
IF you'd like to do that, let me know and i can give you instructions on how to change the synthersizer to something more human sounding.
can you make a recording of you going through the first page just so we can here what's going on?
Another thing you might want to try is pressing Narrator key, capslock plus space and seeing if you can arrow through the instructions that way.
As for your podcast idea, that's not how screen readers work. Yes you can stop speech with control but you can't then keep going from where you left off apart from with NVDA. TO do that you use the shift key like playing and pausing with a podcast but i'm sorry to say that's where the similarities end.
Screen readers have shortcuts for everything from skipping around a webpage, to using the windows/map/phone desktops/launchers/home screens.
You could try NVDA from NVaccess.org which is also free and for windows but you'll probably want to change the voice.
IF you'd like to do that, let me know and i can give you instructions on how to change the synthersizer to something more human sounding.
AtaraxyConsulting [OP] 1 points 1y ago
Thank you for the tip about NVaccess! I might try that next, since Narrator isn't working with my existing accessibility setup.
Follow up: I figured out a big part of why the narrator tutorial wasn't working for me: I don't have working hands and the voice control software I use, (also known as talon from $1) can simulate keypresses of most keys but not of the Capslock key or the Insert key. Most narrator keyboard shortcuts use Capslock or Insert to tell when a keyboard shortcut is meant for Narrator, and since I can't press those I had to go in to the custom keyboards setting and create a custom keyboard shortcut that \*did\* work to toggle the 'hold narrator key continuously' setting, which I guess puts the whole keyboard into a sort of 'Narrator Mode' until you toggle the narrator key off again.
But tweaking that setting had a consequence of putting it into narrator mode instead of 'scan mode.' Narrator apparently has a lot of modes. And the tutorial was assuming I was starting out with a more or less clean computer and not the massive accessibility hack I actually have.
But that had some other shortcomings and long story short I did not manage to hack my computer into being a completely voice-operated, no eyes or hands needed setup.
Follow up: I figured out a big part of why the narrator tutorial wasn't working for me: I don't have working hands and the voice control software I use, (also known as talon from $1) can simulate keypresses of most keys but not of the Capslock key or the Insert key. Most narrator keyboard shortcuts use Capslock or Insert to tell when a keyboard shortcut is meant for Narrator, and since I can't press those I had to go in to the custom keyboards setting and create a custom keyboard shortcut that \*did\* work to toggle the 'hold narrator key continuously' setting, which I guess puts the whole keyboard into a sort of 'Narrator Mode' until you toggle the narrator key off again.
But tweaking that setting had a consequence of putting it into narrator mode instead of 'scan mode.' Narrator apparently has a lot of modes. And the tutorial was assuming I was starting out with a more or less clean computer and not the massive accessibility hack I actually have.
But that had some other shortcomings and long story short I did not manage to hack my computer into being a completely voice-operated, no eyes or hands needed setup.
bradley22 1 points 1y ago
Ah, ok :)
retrolental_morose 2 points 1y ago
Ok, so take your Podcast idea and throw it out the Window. Ctrl will stop the stream of speech and (at least in NVDA) shift will do Play/pause. But a screen reader doesn't Podcast the entire screen anymore than you open a printed letter and read every single character left-to-right, top-to-bottom.
Windows Screen readers, barring special circumstances which I will come to momentarily, use the system focus as their central point. So if you are in a text editor, the "object" is the text field you're typing into. If you are in a folder of documents, the object is the list of files/folders. If you are in a terminal window the object is usually the command-line you are typing and if you are playing a game, there's generally no object for the screen reader to interact with at all. The text in windows dialogs has no focusability - you can't tab or cursor "to" it, so pressing the down arrow is largely fruitless in such a situation.
The big exception here is web-pages, or web-page like views (such as PDF files, emails in some apps and electron-based tools). Here, screen readers generally employ a virtual sort of cursor which allows a flat representation of a document.it's a complex topic but, in broad strokes, CSS is largely relegated to visible states and the screen reader relies far more heavily on HTML tags and ARIA roles.
Windows Screen readers, barring special circumstances which I will come to momentarily, use the system focus as their central point. So if you are in a text editor, the "object" is the text field you're typing into. If you are in a folder of documents, the object is the list of files/folders. If you are in a terminal window the object is usually the command-line you are typing and if you are playing a game, there's generally no object for the screen reader to interact with at all. The text in windows dialogs has no focusability - you can't tab or cursor "to" it, so pressing the down arrow is largely fruitless in such a situation.
The big exception here is web-pages, or web-page like views (such as PDF files, emails in some apps and electron-based tools). Here, screen readers generally employ a virtual sort of cursor which allows a flat representation of a document.it's a complex topic but, in broad strokes, CSS is largely relegated to visible states and the screen reader relies far more heavily on HTML tags and ARIA roles.
AtaraxyConsulting [OP] 1 points 1y ago
That's a great point about system focus. That search term opened up a whole world of much better information about how screen readers actually work. Thank you!
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