[blindLaw] Navigating non-uniform tables in Word with JAWS

[graham.hardy at gmail.com]

There are a couple of commands I use to navigate tables, some of which are more efficient than others. I've been known to copy a table from Word and paste it in Excel. When all else fails, I sometimes get a web page preview by invoking the WebPagePreview command from within the macro/command launcher invoked with Alt+F8. This brings up a page in your default web browser from which you can of course view, but not edit, the table, enough to get acquainted with it.

* Tab and Shift+Tab move from one cell to the next. This sometimes does better in non-uniform tables but is a bit slow. It also adds a row if you press it at the bottom, which can be undone if it's a mistake.

* Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down similarly move among cells and among paragraphs within each. Sometimes this is better. Other times it gets stuck in a non-uniform row.

* Alt+Windows+arrow keys are JAWS commands that are supposed to move to the next or previous row or column and read the entire row or column. This is supposed to allow you to get an entire row read at once with each press of Alt+Windows+Down. This used to be the best way for dealing with non-uniform rows but recently ithas stopped speaking. I've been meaning to call technical support but haven't gotten around to it.

Also, if headings are properly tagged, you can navigate to them with regular heading commands in the JAWSKey+Z layer.

-----Original Message-----
From: BlindLaw <blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Matney, Angela R. via BlindLaw
Sent: Friday, September 1, 2023 12:34 PM
To: Blind Law Mailing List <blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Matney, Angela R. <AMatney at reedsmith.com>
Subject: [blindLaw] Navigating non-uniform tables in Word with JAWS

Hello everyone,

I need to edit and review Word documents that contain tables with non-uniform layouts. For example, most rows of a table in the document I’m currently working on contain three columns. But some rows are used as headings, and the heading spans all three columns, though it’s a single cell in the table. The problem is that if I use control-alt-down to navigate to the next row, JAWS will skip over these “heading” rows unless I am in the first column. This is somewhat annoying, as the first column basically contains nothing but numbers, and I would prefer to “skim” the table by staying on the second column, which contains the substantive entries. But I would like JAWS to announce the headings and not simply skip to the next row containing three columns.

I’ve also experienced this with tables where the columns do not have the same number of rows. (And, in one mind-altering instance, with a table that had both of these going on!)

I’ve searched (OK, maybe it was a fairly cursory search…) for JAWS settings that might impact this behavior, but I haven’t yet found anything. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Angie (AKA Vexed in Virginia)


Angela R. Matney, CIPP/US (Angie)
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