P.S. This is for windows laptops, with precision touchpad drivers, and, NVDA users. Don't know about Jaws.

A while back, Saw some post about using touchpads on this thread, and, thought of putting up a guide of sorts to do cool things with their touchpads.

When I had my interaction with MacBook’s, I was impressed by Voiceover’s capacity to utilize touchpad gestures, to… well… make our lives easy. Don’t know how many users actually used it, but, I surely felt that this damn square piece of plastic, or metal, or glass, or whatever, which came with my laptop, sometimes annoyingly messing with the controls due to my palm touching it, could be utilized in a better manner, to do the same thing that voiceover did for its users, making our lives easy. I feel a NVDA addon can be developed to see if this thing can be used in an more effective manner, but, until then, here's what I do.

I was already looking in to customizing touchpad gestures in windows, and got to know that it was possible, with precision touchpad drivers. Sadly, my old laptop didn’t have it. But, the new 1 I got, Inspiron 15 5515, luckily had it! That could be checked by simply searching for advance touchpad gestures in windows search. If there’s a advance gestures page, then, Yea! You can customize touchpad the way you want!

So, here’s what amazing stuff you can program your touchpad to do for you!

Firstly, go to this advance touchpad gestures page in windows settings, by searching for same in windows settings. Note that advance page only shows up if you have the previously mentioned drivers. There, you can customize what the 3 and 4 finger taps and swipes will do on touchpad. I was pleased to see windows already providing some pretty cool options for these gestures, my favorites being media controls, volume up/down, etc. And, at least on my laptop, the touchpad has never mistaken my palm for 3 or 4 finger taps or swipes, it only sometimes moved mouse curser. If you are satisfied with these given options, good for yah! But, I wanted to see how far I can go with this.

Keen eyed users will notice a custom option for those swipes and taps. Now, all this custom option actually does is assign some alt+control+shift+Windows+f24 or f22 or whatever key combination like that to the selected gesture. I know I know, your keyboard doesn’t have function keys beyond 12. But, that doesn’t mean more of these useful keys don’t exist. They just aren’t there on your keyboard due to space constraints, and, usually windows or apps don’t use them. But, with this custom gesture, you can record a custom key press or mouse click you want to perform, or, you can do what I did, unleash the power of Auto Hot Key and NVDA’s input gestures dialog box.

Now, all you have to do is either install auto hot key, and understand what keys are being pressed with your gesture with its keyboard hook function, or, simply turn on NVDA Help by pressing NVDA + 1, and performing the touchpad gesture. After this, you’ve got 2 options. Either directly use those custom gestures thing in NVDA’s input gesture dialog box, or, use Auto Hot key, to specify some complex scripts to be performed with your custom gestures. The first option is simple and will give you ability to control NVDA with touchpad, the second option is lot of headache with lot of control and ability to make those gestures behave differently in different apps, say, browsers or Microsoft word. Yeah, you can specify that that 3 finger swipe will do, may be a Ctrl+ down arrow on ms word for reading next paragraph, and press h while in browser window, to navigate via headings with auto hot key.

Note that I’ve personally noticed Auto Hot Key giving some problems with certain keys being pressed down, even when they are not being held down by me. Basically it’s a weird technically problem that affects certain keyboards, and the way windows and Auto Hot Key are handling key pressed down and key released events. So, go for auto hot key option only if you have technical knowhow and are willing to deal with occasional issues. Also, certain games might flag this as a speed hack or cheating thing.

For rest of us though, the windows given options, and NVDA’s input gestures being combined with touchpad gestures gives lot of ability to use our touchpads in useful ways.

Hope this helps.