Press L key to move to lists, or press I to move to list items. Use case: to quickly find links that you haven't visited yet, simply toggle through them by pressing U. Press K to move to links, or press V / U to move to visited / unvisited links. If you are really curious and want to learn more about this, skip ahead and read How to handle headings. If you open a page on Wikipedia and want to read its main content, simply press the 1 key once (because the first is the main content's heading).If you know that the login form on a specific page is introduced by the 2nd heading on level 3, simply press 2 times the 3 key.To get a broad picture of a page's areas and contents, just navigate through all headings.Press H to move to headings, or press 1 to 6 to target their specific levels. Important: as opposed to keyboard only users, screen reader users usually do not use the Tab key to read a page! If you haven't done this yet, go back and read Screen readers' browse and focus modes to know the difference between navigation using Arrow keys and Tab key. For this, simply use Ctrl + Down (or Ctrl + Up). a complete paragraph regardless of its length). In addition to this, the NVDA screen reader allows to read elements fully in one go (e.g. This is to make very long sentences easily digestible for the user: they're simply split into small parts, and the user controls when to move to the next (or previous) part. To navigate to the previous one, press the Up key.ĭepending on the screen reader, a 'line' is around 80 characters and can be compared to a line of text in the multi-column layout of a newspaper.To navigate from one line of text to the next one, press the Down key.The standard way to read through a document is to move the screen reader cursor from line to line: This is to work around any autofocus functionality, so the user can be sure that the screen reader starts reading from the very beginning of the document. So if you haven't done this yet, go back and read How to browse websites using a keyboard only.Īfter the page has loaded (indicated by screen readers by announcing the current page's element), most blind users always intuitively press Ctrl + Home first. This is done the same way like using a keyboard only. So be ready to get a concrete idea of the main strategies available to read a website using a desktop screen reader! While mobile screen readers already offer a pretty good idea of how it is to surf the internet as a blind person, they offer way less features (and thus complexity) than desktop ones.

How to read websites using a desktop screen reader

Website accessibility screen reader