In this Blind Vet Tech Quick Guides, News and Reviews podcast, we continue our “getting Started with Narrator” series. This series enables one to learn the basics of Narrator by following along by bringing the Get Started with Narrator by Microsoft’s Accessibility team support guide alive in a podcast. Our Getting Started with Narrator series is a companion tool for our monthly Blind Vet Tech Monthly Narrator Talk which occurs on the second Tuesday of the month at 1300 CST. To learn how to connect, click here.

To follow along, you will need Windows 10 Fall Creators Edition or later, since earlier versions of Windows 10 do not have many of the same key combos or functions as newer versions of Windows. Anyone with Windows 8 or older will not be able to follow along on their computers, since Narrator was very limited in these versions. We feel very strongly that Narrator’s updates since Windows 10, and especially after Falls Creator update, there is little need for JAWS or NVDA if you require a screen reader to preform simple tasks like emailing, surfing the web, drafting Office documents, reading PDFs, or interacting with apps.

Chapter 3 focuses on navigating with Scan Mode. Scan mode is an interesting combination of single key navigation found within JAWS, the Voice Over Rotor in iOS, and the MacOS Voice Over Keyboard Commander. Pressing Caps Lock plus Spacebar will enable and disable Scan Mode, so if you hear Narrator announce that Scan Mode is On when you switch to an app like Edge, this is how to deactivate it and use basic keyboard navigation. However, Scan Mode provides a more efficient method to navigate around webpages to apps like Netflix with single or multiple key commands. Here are some of the notable key commands for Scan Mode:

Caps Lock Spacebar activates and deactivates Scan Mode

* Up and down arrow keys will navigate you to the next and previous paragraph or element on the screen

* Spacebar activates links, buttons, and page elements

* Heading navigation only requires the pressing of H or Shift H; 1, 2, 3, 4, etc….; or Alt up or Alt Down

* Link navigation only requires the pressing of K or Shift K; or Alt left or right arrow

* Table navigation requires pressing of Control, and Alt with any arrow key to move to the next or previous cell

Scan Mode offers many more key combinations you may learn about through this podcast or by visiting Microsoft’s official Get Started with Narrator guide.

If you enjoy the Blind Vet Tech Podcast series, we invite anyone interested in assistive technology for the blind to join us on our monthly tech teleconferences. Click here to see a list of our calls and how to connect via Zoom.

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