JAWS screen reader, Discourse and Shortcuts

Support
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1

I am working with a user who must access Discourse using the JAWS screen reader. Our first attempt was slow as the JAWS shortcuts somehow interfered with those of Discourse.

Is there a tutorial or any advice on how to make this work smoothly? It looks like the Discourse shortcuts cover much of what a user will want to do.

Relatedly, categories in our instance are set up with subcategories. JAWS likes to read them all out in a string, making it impossible to ‘choose’ a sub-category from the list to go to. This may be an artifact of trying to use JAWS in a generic, non-Discourse way, but I welcome others’ thoughts about how to make this a better experience.

2

Screenreaders capture a lot of keys for their own navigation shortcuts by default (virtual cursor mode), which prevents ours from being used.

This mode can be toggled off, in JAWS you need to use the JAWS key + z (depending on settings this might be insert + z or caps lock + z). Doing that should grant access to the Discourse shortcuts, but let us know if they still don’t work.

Where specifically? is this in a menu, on the /categories page? somewhere else?