Topic by Dark 2016-02-05 23:04:51

  • Dark
  • He who writes
  • Offline
  • From: The Ivory Tower
  • Registered: 2005-12-16
  • Posts: 29,196
  • User Karma: 3,494

Hi everyone

As most people wil know, I've just movd in with my lady. She's bought with her a new desktop she got in England recently running windows 7, which has window eyes installed.
The problem is that this is proving a bit of a pest to use, both because my lady is used to using window eyes in German, and because she's not certain of a few speak keys, eg, when using alt enter to look at the properties of a file or folder, how to read the hole property sheet (including size information), rather than just tab through the boxes.

I found the window eyes basic manual, but either her computer is slightly wonky or window eyes doesn't work properly as the manual said, sinse I tried keys such as ctrl shift s and insert s and they didn't workas described to read status bar, while ctrl shift r didn't seem to be a continuous document read (I found that numberpad minus said w e curser or mouse curser, but I couldn't move this around or do anything with it like the dolphin curser).

If anyone could give a few basic tips to using window eyes on windows 7, I'd appreciate knowing, eg, what the keys are for readin different screen elements, and how the w e curser works, and what the heck this  browse mode thing is.

My lady has used the internet and done some file transfer type of stuff, but I think knowing a little about reading the actual screen contents that isn't directly announced might be handy.

Thanks in advance,

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

Dark's Website

Quote Post 1

Thumbs up

Reply by Sebby 2016-02-06 16:54:23

  • Sebby
  • Audio Quaker
  • Offline
  • From: London, UK
  • Registered: 2013-04-20
  • Posts: 2,500
  • User Karma: 149

Hi Dark.

As you know, I'm not often in Windows nowadays, so I apologise if any of this turns out to be wrong, but here is what I remember from my glorious past as a Window-Eyes advocate. smile

Control-Shift-W reads the entire window.

The WE cursor is an invisible cursor. The mouse cursor moves the mouse. Use the numpad to move the respective cursors once selected: 8 is up, 2 is down, 4 is left, 6 is right. I think I also remember that numpad slash is left-click, and numpad star is right.

This should be adequate to get you navigating about. Press Control-backslash to open up Window-Eyes itself. There the Help menu takes you to the important documentation for the rest of the system (which is, FWIW, quite considerable). It's not unreasonable to say that Window-Eyes is a highly manual screen reader, compared to its rivals.

I hope this is sufficient to get you going and I'm glad you're doing well.

Just myself, as usual.

Sebby's Website

Quote Post 2

Thumbs up

Reply by pitermach 2016-02-06 17:45:11

  • From: poland
  • Registered: 2008-01-23
  • Posts: 1,620
  • User Karma: 320

If the hotkeys don't do what the manual says, I think you have the insert key layout turned on. The new window-eyes versions, starting with I think either 8 or 9, ship with a whole bunch of scripts installed. One of them is a setup wizard that, on first launch, lets you set up a couple of most important settings like voice, what keys to speak as well as the keyboard layout. I installed Window-Eyes 9.3 recently and the default selection in that setup wizard for the keyboard layout is set to "alternative insert layout", or something to that effect anyway. This layout is designed to mimmic the typical layout of most other screen readers, mostly JAWS and NVDA. Window-Eyes's default keyboard commands are very unique and different - case and point being that insert T in JAWS and NVDA reads the window title, while in Window-Eyes it's used to get the current date and time.

Here's the confusing part. This insert layout is implemented in a separate script, which has its own settings. So even though your Window-Eyes control panel may be saying you're using the standard desktop or laptop layout, that script is overwriting it. Because your friend is used to the standard WE keys, you'll probably just want to turn this script off. You can do that from the apps menu. Open the WE control panel, hit Alt+A to open the apps menu, down arrow to insert key layout, open its submenu and choose the "disable" option .

<Insert passage from "The Book Of Chrome" here>

Quote Post 3

Thumbs up

Reply by queenslight 2016-02-06 18:48:04

  • From: Denver, Colorado
  • Registered: 2012-01-04
  • Posts: 2,617
  • User Karma: 168

You can also press ctrl-alt-0 , to enable/disable the insert-key layout from anywhere.

BTW, the "We Cursor," is now known as the "invisiable" cursor

queenslight's Website

Quote Post 4

Thumbs up

Reply by Dark 2016-02-06 19:31:34

  • Dark
  • He who writes
  • Offline
  • From: The Ivory Tower
  • Registered: 2005-12-16
  • Posts: 29,196
  • User Karma: 3,494

Thanks people, this sounds like helpful stuff to know.
I was rather surprised there wasn't an easily moveable on screen curser. What started looking into this was attempting to get to read the properties window when you hit alt enter on a folder or a drive to see the space, sinse right now my lady is attempting to do a lot of indexing onto different drives and isn't sure of how much space she has ware.

In supernova though you can just hit numbpad plus and arrow down to get the info, however could I find how to read it in window eyes? could I heck!

After looking in the manual I tried ctrl shift w and ctrl shift s, but neither helped and both seemed to read random bits of the screen.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

Dark's Website

Quote Post 5

Thumbs up

Reply by pitermach 2016-02-06 20:07:33

  • From: poland
  • Registered: 2008-01-23
  • Posts: 1,620
  • User Karma: 320

Control shift W reads the whole window top to bottom, which is only really useful in message boxes that ask you a question. As for mouse movement, with the previously mentioned insert layout turned on, moving the Window-Eyes mouse works a lot like the JAWS/dolphin cursor. You press numpad minus to start moving the mouse, and then you can just use the arrow keys to read by lines, characters and words. Then pressing numpad plus turns it off and you can move the focus normally.

With the normal WE desktop layout, the best way I can describe it is that you should think of the numpad as another set of arrow keys or a joystick. You don't need to turn on any specific cursor to move the mouse, because this is always done with the numpad. imagine that 5 is the center of this joystick and it will read the current character. Branching off from this you have the arrow keys. Numpad 8, which is directly above, is like the up arrow and it moves up a line, while numpad 2, which is directly below, moves down a line. 4 and 6, which are to the sides, move back and forward a character. Lastly, the keys in the corners move to the edges of the screen - 7, which is in the top left corner moves to the top left of the window (IE the very first character), 9 is the top right, 1 is the bottom left and 3 is bottom right. the last 2 keys that may be useful are the numpad slash and asterisk which respectively perform a left and right mouse click, and this is no matter what layout you're using.

<Insert passage from "The Book Of Chrome" here>

Quote Post 6

Thumbs up

Reply by Dark 2016-02-20 16:48:10

  • Dark
  • He who writes
  • Offline
  • From: The Ivory Tower
  • Registered: 2005-12-16
  • Posts: 29,196
  • User Karma: 3,494

Hi.

thanks for all the tips. One thing we were wondering is how to change the verbosity, ie, get Window eyes to stop reading all the punctuation such as dashes, parrenthesis, and stuff like "Heading 4" when reading web pages.

I don't want to go mucking about with the speech settings in window eyes (assuming I could find them), so any suggestions much  appreciated.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

Dark's Website

Quote Post 7

Thumbs up

Reply by pitermach 2016-02-20 19:13:54

  • From: poland
  • Registered: 2008-01-23
  • Posts: 1,620
  • User Karma: 320

The way Window-eyes does punctuation is slightly different to how it works usually. Instead of having options for none, some, most and all, it has 3 groups that can be controlled separately - textual, math, and miscellaneous. Go into the control panel, and expand the option for screen and find the setting for punctuation. Now you can just tab into the various combo boxes for each level. If you press F1 anywhere in Window-Eyes settings you'll get a short help message on what that option does. in the case of these punctuation levels it tells you what kind of characters are in each.

As for heading levels, while you're still in the control panel go down to the verbocity section, expand it, then find the browse mode section and expand that as well. You will now see all the various controls here including headings. Once again, tab off of the tree view to see what you can change. The nice thing in WE is that you can change whether something is announced separately for just moving around normally and when it's doing a read to end (the equivllent of document read in SuperNova). So, when you go to heading, you will see 2 sets of radio buttons whether heading levels should be announced, 1 for reading in general, and one for read to end. And remember to press ctrl+S to save your settings when you change them! big_smile

<Insert passage from "The Book Of Chrome" here>

Quote Post 8

Thumbs up