[nfbcs] Practical Tips for Improving a Blind Person's Productivity on Computers

[Curtis Chong via nfbcs]

Greetings:

Here are some things that I do to increase my productivity on the computer.

1.	I use the Run (Windows+R) command whenever and wherever I can make
it work.

I type the address of a web page directly from the Run dialog;
I type "outlook" to start Outlook;
I type "winword" to start Word;
I type "excel" to start Excel;
I type "control" to bring up the Control Panel;
I type "wineyes" to start Window-Eyes;
I type "jaws15" to start JAWS version 15; and
I type a drive letter (e.g., c:) to open Windows explorer for a specific
drive.

2.	In Outlook, I use the legacy keys to accomplish common tasks:

Control+N to open a new message from the inbox;
Control+2 to go directly to my Outlook calendar;
Control+3 to go directly to my Outlook Contacts Folder;
Control+Shift+E to create a new Outlook folder;
Control+Y to open the dialog which enables me to move to a different Outlook
folder.

3.	When I want to force a save to go to a specific folder, I open that
folder in Windows Explorer, press Alt+D to open the address box, and copy
the entire path to the clipboard. Then, I Alt+Tab back to the save, place a
backslash in front of the file name, move the cursor to the backslash, and
press Control+V to paste the path in front of the backslash.

4.	As much as possible I like to have all of my shortcuts on the
Desktop. for websites that I frequently visit, I create a shortcut on the
Desktop instead of setting it up as a Favorite in Internet Explorer.

5.	For serious editors, JAWS for Windows has two great features which I
find are not as well known as they could be. The first one is the text mark
feature, which allows you to mark a spot in your Word document, move the
cursor way down to the end of your selection, and then tell JAWS to select
everything between the mark and your cursor. This greatly simplifies the
task of selecting many pages of information in your document.

The second feature I use is the JAWS text analyzer. This feature scans your
Word document for things like format or font changes, running spaces,
mismatched parentheses, etc. and tells you where the errors are so that you
can fix them if, in fact, they are errors.

6.	In Microsoft Word, I frequently use the Paste Special function,
activated with Control+Alt+V. This brings up a dialog in which you can tell
Word to paste only the unformatted text from the material you have copied to
the clipboard.

I find all of the above to be helpful to improve my over-all efficiency
using the computer.

Cordially,

Curtis Chong


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