Bill Holton
If you’ve ever turned in a research paper or work report written using MS Word using a screen reader only to learn that your tables are not APA compliant and, even worse, you accidentally used four different fonts, underlined and italicized random words, and changed font sizes every other page then…join the crowd. We’ve all made “unsightly” errors in our printed work, mistakes that all but leap off the page for sighted writers, but that can be easy for users of screen readers to miss. These days, the big two screen readers, JAWS and NVDA, offer a number of useful tools to help you create letter-perfect research papers and reports.
The goal of a new book from the National Braille Press, Format Your Word Documents with JAWS and NVDA: A Guide for Students and Professionals, by David Kingsbury, aims to teach you how to use these tools. Kingsbury is an assistive technology instructor at the Carroll Center for the Blind and writes in the introduction: “The primary objective of this book is to help you format Word documents that look professional using the JAWS and NVDA screen reader programs.” His second goal is to familiarize students and other professionals with the various ins and outs of the three major academic style standards: the American Psychological Association (APA), the Modern Language Association (MLA), and The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS).
Kingsbury begins with a discussion of these three standards, focusing in on the digital availability and accessibility and learning resources for each. He points out that students can download sample documents that demonstrate each standard, but notes that: “Sighted students only have to glance at these files and mimic what they see. Yet they are useless to blind students because, when using a screen reader program, no formatting information can be detected from a PDF.”
Keystrokes and the Ribbon
Before you can format a research paper or other document, you first have to write it. After the overview of the three style standards, Kingsbury takes a detailed look at keyboard commands both native to Word and used by the two major screen readers. Next he tackles the Word Ribbon, which can be confusing to screen reader users, to say the least. He describes how to navigate the Ribbon using the Tab and Arrow keys, and does an excellent job introducing the user to shortcut key combinations, such as CTRL+E to center justify text, and using the key sequence Alt+S+P to insert a caption or title in the current table. He also discusses how to use your screen reader to navigate a Word dialog box and other tasks, and highlights various differences in the way JAWS and NVDA handle text navigation, spell checking, and other essential tasks.
Advanced users are invited to skip ahead, but before we do, I did notice two omissions I think are worth mentioning here.
First, if there is a command buried deep inside the Ribbon that you use frequently, it is possible to add the command to the Quick Access toolbar, which displays at the upper left of the Word screen, just above the Ribbon’s File tab. Shuffle these commands into your preferred order, and you can then use ALT +1 to invoke the first custom command, ALT+2 for the second, and so on, much the same as you would press CTRL+Alt+1 to create a level-one heading and CTRL+Alt+2 to create a level-two heading. Learn more about adding features to the Quick Access toolbar.
You can also create a custom keyboard shortcut for any Word command, macro, font, style, or frequently used symbol, and then press a that key combination instead of navigating deep into the Ribbon to access the feature you need. Get started at the Office Support Customizing Keyboard Shortcuts page.
I do not count it against the author that he did not mention either of these Word features, as they require the user to have the permissions to change Word’s normal.dot document template, which you may not if you are using a work or university computer. That said, there is one other Office feature I was surprised Kingsbury did fail to mention. It’s called “Tell me what you want to do,” and it’s accessible by pressing Alt+Q. Type in a word you think is in the command you want and press enter. For example, typing “Comments” into the search field summons options to go to next and previous comment, insert a comment, a “show markup” submenu with options to display insertions and deletions, formatting, other authors, and another nested submenu where you can choose to show these elements in balloons or inline. Pressing Enter on any of these invokes the command directly. This method is handy for finding those seldom used commands buried deep inside the Office Ribbon.
Formatting for Success
It’s in Chapter 4 where Kingsbury gets down to the true meat and potatoes of this book. He begins with a thorough overview of fonts, including how to change them and, more importantly, how to check to make sure you haven’t added inadvertent underlines or bold text, or changed the font size or color. This section alone can save the reader considerable embarrassment. The author highlights the different formatting requirements of APA, MLA and CMOS,, and describes how each handles fonts, margins, headers, footers and formatted lists—useful information, even if your instructor or boss doesn’t require strict style guide adherence.
In Chapter 5 we learn pretty much everything there is to know about how to create, edit, and navigate Word tables using a screen reader. Chapter 6 discusses footnotes and endnotes, along with Word’s citations and bibliography tools. Feel free to jump forward to this chapter, since as we all know, creating footnotes and bibliographies is always the most enjoyable part of writing any research paper (ironic smile.)
It’s always good to get a second, third, perhaps even a fourth opinion on your work before you turn it in. Or perhaps you are collaborating with fellow students or coworkers on a project and you need to chime in with a comment or two. In Chapter 7 Kingsbury covers creating comments, and how to access, review, accept and or delete both comments and the tracked changes others have added to your document. Again, the screen reader tips and tricks are well placed and welcome, especially in the sections that discuss the JAWS Text Analyzer, JAWS sound schemes as a proofreading tool, and NVDA document formatting tool and how to set it up for maximum proofreading assistance.
Kingsbury ends the main text of the "Format Your Word Documents with JAWS and NVDA" section with a few “Additional Considerations” to help add those essential final touches on a research paper or document: title page, abstract placement and formatting, section breaks and tables of content, pictures, and lists of tables and figures. I am not sure why this chapter comes after the proofreading information, as you're going to want to redo your proofreading after performing any of these enhancements.
The book concludes with four useful available keystroke appendices covering Word, Jaws, NVDA, and Windows.
Recommendations
This book is an essential resource for people with visual impairments who are starting high school or college, but others will also find it useful. Whether you’re writing reports at work, chugging away on that first novel, or just want to ensure your business and personal correspondence are letter perfect you will benefit from the author’s bulleted, step-by-step approach to many of Word’s advanced features. Take note, however, that there are many features not covered in the book. Two I wish had been included are Word’s “Feedback with Sound,” feature and the Accessibility Checker. Desktop publishers may also be disappointed with the lack of information regarding text column formatting and hyphenation. Granted, these are not features often used in research papers, and any serious desktop publisher is likely using a Mac, in which case I suggest you take a look at A Review of My Mac Pages: A VoiceOver Guide to Word Processing, by Anne and Archie Robertson from the April, 2016 issue of AccessWorld.
I did appreciate the discussion of both JAWS and NVDA, but I think subsequent editions of this book should include at least a command list for Narrator, which seems to be growing in both popularity and functionality. The author also needs to explain, at the very least, why he chose to omit any mention of Word for the Mac.
Minor quibbles aside, this old dog learned a few new tricks from this book, and I do believe you will, too.
Where to Purchase
Format Your Word Documents with JAWS and NVDA: A Guide for Students and Professionals, by David Kingsbury is available from the National Braille Press bookstore in Braille, BRF, DAISY or Word.DOCX downloadable files for $18. You can add an additional $2 for any version preloaded on a USB drive
This article is made possible in part by generous funding from the James H. and Alice Teubert Charitable Trust, Huntington, West Virginia.
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