Joe's blog

Tag: NVDA

  • NVDA Testing Tips

    Here’s a collection of tips for testing using the NVDA screen reader. I’ll add to this as time goes on.

    Speech display verbosity

    NVD has a speech viewer tool; this displays the text spoken by NVDA, including both onscreen text and any interaction information. This is useful when you are either unsure what NVDA just said, or you want a screen shot to illustrate a particular problem.

    This screenshot shows the speech viewer after I interacted with the BBC website.

    Display the speech viewer with the keyboard shortcut NVDA+n, t, s. This does the following:

    • NVDA+n opens the NVDA menu
    • t displays the tools sub-menu
    • s displays the speech viewer

    You may find, as a mouse user, that using the speech viewer whilst also using the mouse causes the speech viewer to become populated with extra commands and feedback resulting from the mouse use. This is caused by an NVDA feature called mouse tracking, which is enabled by default.

    Whilst useful for sighted mouse users who need reading support, mouse tracking rapidly fills the speech viewer with extraneous content. Toggle mouse tracking off (and back on again) with NVDA+m. With mouse tracking off, the speech viewer will only display content and functionality resulting from keyboard interaction.

    In brief: speech verbosity

    To get more verbose feedback when using the NVDA speech viewer:

    • Enable the NVDA speech viewer with NVDA+n, t, s
    • Toggle mouse tracking off with NVDA+m
    • NVDA+1, NVDA+2 respectively toggle character and word echo when typing. Toggle both to off to further streamline feedback.

    Disable NVDA for current application

    Often I’ll be using NVDA to review a website or application, whilst taking screenshots and making notes as I go.

    I don’t need the NVDA feedback whilst I’m also writing into a Word doc. Handily, it is easy to disable NVDA (or set it to sleep) for the current application, with the keyboard command NVDA+shift+s. This toggles sleep mode for the current application.

    This works well when alt+tabbing between the app being reviewed and an associated notes doc.

  • I’m an NVDA Certified Expert!

    In November 2019, I passed the NVDA certified expert exam.

    NVDA Certified Expert

    I wanted to take the exam to help solidify my learning and understanding. I’ve used NVDA for a while in my day to day accessibility testing, so had a working knowledge of it. I felt pretty comfortable at basic web tasks:

    • Navigating pages using elements and land marks
    • Reading page titles
    • Interacting with forms

    There was a lot I didn’t know and which will be useful in testing websites more effectively, particularly:

    • Review cursor; this is a separate cursor allowing you to read text – typically nearby – without moving the actual cursor
    • Shortcuts for modifying the speech rate (speed); lengthy pages can be time consuming to evaluate purely due to the amount of content. As you get more comfortable with NVDA, increasing the speech rate helps test pages far quicker.