[NABS-L] Advice for the Perusall platform

[Noor Khraisat]

Hi!
I actually used it for one of my classes last fall, but I was using a Mac
and this was an about a year ago.
Hi!
I actually used it for one of my classes last fall, but I was using a Mac
and this was about a year ago.
As a workaround for highlighting comments, which did not work for me, I got
credit by just responding to threads that people have already started.
However, after doing a quick Google search, I found this information from
their website:

Navigating the text and starting conversations

Navigating the text with a keyboard requires caret mode in your browser,
which is supported by the Chrome, Firefox, and Edge browsers. To toggle
caret mode on or off, press F7. (In Firefox, the settings option *Always
use the cursor keys to navigate within pages* will also need to be checked
for caret mode to work.) Other browsers, including Safari, do not support
the use of the keyboard to highlight text to create annotations.

To create highlights, enable *caret mode* in your browser, and then use the
arrow keys to navigate the text. Hold down *Shift* and use the arrow keys
to create a highlight, and then press *Enter* to start a conversation based
on that highlight.

To move the focus to the main content area, press *⌘ + Shift + **Z*.

https://support.perusall.com/hc/en-us/articles/360049314893-How-to-navigate-Perusall-with-a-keyboard-and-enable-read-aloud

Hope this helps!
Noor Khraisat


















President Pennsylvania Association of Blind students
Board member national federation of the blind of Pennsylvania
Coe-chair advocacy committee national association of blind students
Member national Association of blind lawyers

Sister’s social chair Muslim student association university of Pittsburgh
Founder of the global cultures club
History research assistant


On Sun, Jan 18, 2026 at 11:57 PM Sara Luna via NABS-L <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
wrote:

> Hello everyone,
> Do any of you have experience with, using the learning platform, Perusall.
> I am in an online grad school program and, one of my classes is using
> Perusall.
> I am having some accessibility challenges so far with the platform. We
> have weekly text based discussions where, students have to upload a file
> with their responses to the discussion questions. Then, each student has to
> comment on three other students posts.
> My issue is that, to leave a comment a user has to highlight text in the
> document to anchor their comment to that text. I haven’t been able to find
> a way to do this using voiceover on Mac and iOS. While I can navigate to
> text that I would want to highlight, I haven’t been able to do it in a way
> where, the platform recognizes that I want to make a comment. Since this is
> a required class, even if I did decide to drop it, I would still just have
> to take it again in the future.
> Have any of you used? Perusall in the past? Do you have any advice or
> hacks to work around it? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks
> Sara
>
>
> Sara Luna
> She, her, hers.
>  Board member, National Federation of the Blind of Illinois.
> “It is not important to be better than someone else but, to be be better
> than yesterday”
> Dr. Jigoro Kano.
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