I'm trying to test the screenreader dialogue on my application for 508 compliance. It works mostly how it should except a problem I'm running into is when I navigate element to element the screenreader reads each keystroke like so "TAB" when I want to traverse through my application. How can I turn this off while testing? I'm running JAWS 17.
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You can't and you shouldn't. Different verbosity settings like functional keys announcement, punctuation reading, repeated characters announcement, treatment of dialog controls and so on, and so forth, — all of these are entirely up to the screen reader and the user who adjusts these settings. Just like, for example, speech rate or pitch. As a JAWS user, I wouldn't be happy, and more than that, I would be angry if some app developer forced me to turn off my Tab
announcement or changed my punctuation level.
Update: If you just want to turn off keystrokes announcement for yourself, do the following:
- Press Insert+6 on the number row to go to JAWS Settings Center. You can do this from the JAWS main menu, but the single keystroke is much faster.
- If you want to make your change by default for all apps, press Ctrl+Shift+D to open the default file.
- In the search box type
labels
and search for Key Labels. - In the dialog that appears turn off the announcement for all of the keystrokes you don't want to hear. Note that if you mute Tab, all of the keystrokes like Shift+Tab and Ctrl+Tab will be muted automagically.
- click OK several times to leave Settings Center and save your settings.

Andre Polykanine
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I don't think you understood the question. For TESTING purposes I'd like to eliminate hearing keystrokes. I'm not forcing a user to do anything. These controls are all set by the end user so a developer like myself would not care what the verbosity, speech rate, pitch, etc. is set to on their end. In earlier editions of JAWS I never heard keystrokes, but now I do. It's not as simple as saying "that's just how the screenreader works". It can be adjusted but I'm not sure how... – Kode_12 Aug 26 '16 at 15:23
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1Ah OK, sorry then, I thought you would need to eliminate those for all of your users. I'll update the answer. – Andre Polykanine Aug 26 '16 at 16:21
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It's just a user setting options. If you do that in your jaws, it's coild bé different for an other person !

halna frédéric
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