If you are using a small screen, or just have a little trouble reading the display, you might find Narrator handy. Narrator, available in Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 is a text to speech application which sits under the accessibility tools menu under the Start Menu and offers useful voice narration of your Windows experience, from repeating the keys pressed to reading the window titles. Narrator isn’t perfect and it works in only a few applications but what it does is provides an additional level of feedback to help navigate the Windows interface.

To start Narrator, either navigate to the accessibility folder in the programs menu or simply press the Windows key and U. Once started there are several key options to choose:

• Announce events on screen
• Read typed characters (from the keyboard)
• Start Narrator minimised (to save screen space)
• Move the mouse pointer to the active item (to help navigation)
• You can also select the Voice button and choose another voice if one is available (see later)

Some of the keyboard controls for Narrator include:

• CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER Get information about the current item
• CTRL+SHIFT+SPACEBAR Read the entire selected window
• CTRL+ALT+SPACEBAR Read the selected window layout
• ALT+HOME Get information about the current item
• ALT+END Get a summary of the current item
• CTRL Stop Narrator from reading text
• From Vista onwards…
• INSERT+SHIFT+G Read a description of the dependent elements of the currently selected element
• INSERT+CTRL+G Read a description of the non-dependent elements adjacent to the currently selected element
• INSERT+CTRL+HOME Enter Virtual Menu navigation mode, which allows you to access Narrator commands without switching from the program that you’re currently working with
• INSERT+Q Move the text selection to the start of the previous text pattern
• INSERT+W Move the text selection to the start of the next text pattern
• INSERT+E Move the text selection to the start of the current text pattern
• INSERT+R Move the text selection to the end of the current text pattern
• INSERT+F2 Select all of the text with the current text pattern
• INSERT+F3 Read the current character
• INSERT+F4 Read the current word
• INSERT+F5 Read the current line
• INSERT+F6 Read the current paragraph
• INSERT+F7 Read the current page
• INSERT+F8 Read the current document

You can get additional voices for Narrator for XP, but its not straightforward and you need to be comfortable editing the registry (don’t mess with the registry unless you are comfortable with what you are doing). Head over the Speech SDK 5.1 and download the file SpeechSDK51.exe. Once downloaded and extracted install it using the setup program. Once installed load up the registry editor and navigate to HKLM->Software->Microsoft->Speech->Voices->Tokens->MSSam and edit the two registry key strings VoiceData and VoiceDef and replace sam.spd and sam.sdf to mary.spd and mary.sdf respectively (instead of Mary you could use Mike). Next time Narrator starts you should get a different voice.

Related

• Tip: Windows XP Shortcuts
• Tools for cleaning up the Windows registry
• Roundup of Useful Windows 7 Tips
• Enabling Numlock on Windows Start Up
• Windows 7: Installing Windows XP Mode