Using Narrator - Comments and Observations

Since I learn better by doing, I chose to use as much of the assistive technologies as possible. So I'm going through the online prep course partially blind. 

This is my first real, extensive use of screen readers to interact with web content outside of a text to speech tool to read digital books. I have very strong prescription glasses, and without them have extreme vision impairment. To learn more about the screen readers intimately, I remove my glasses and navigate with keyboard only through the Deque prep course pages, and the browser.

Part of being able to apply good user experience is being able to feel the users frustrations and use that to better inform design decisions. This has been frustrating as a new user, but getting more and more familiar.

Things I like about it:
  • I appreciate that it calls things out when they are misspelled as I type.
  • I'm glad I can better understand it at a much faster speed now.
  • I'm more familiar with the key commands and feel comfortable navigating through simple content with the arrow keys if I want to revisit something I missed.
Frustrations:
  • I began using it in Chrome which is not it's recommended browser, and had trouble with the focus being completely NOT visible on the web content that it's actually reading. It looked to be about 2000 pixels to the left of the content in general which is frustrating. Switching to Edge addressed that.
  • Getting a clear "vision" of a bullet list is difficult, and I often have to review it multiple times to get a better idea of the hierarchy and what it's saying.
  • I make frequent mistakes in which key commands do what, and will accidentally get lost outside of the region and not know where I am or how to get back.
  • I'm not quick enough to select the "skip navigation link" and end up selecting the page icon that returns me to the prep course home page.
  • I'm used to listening to text read to me and multi-tasking, but I can't do that with a screen reader on because it will just start speaking what I'm typing if I'm taking notes on what I'm listening to.

Current favorite and most-used keyboard shortcuts with Narrator:
  • CAPS + R
  • H
  • and D

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