[Athen] Perusal (long)

[Deborah Armstrong via athen-list]

I have a student new to blindness and screen readers who is using NVDA and struggling with Perusal, as I posted here before.
Below is the long email I sent her this morning. Hopefully it can help someone else.
The big problem I think is that the interface has so many different panels and keyboard users need to highlight text which JAWS blocks completely and NVDA allows only with its “native selection” mode. Here’s my email to this student:

Dear <name withheld>:
I spent an hour experimenting with Perusal this morning.
In summary: you can use it with a screen reader, but it’s a bit of a challenge. I can show you what I’ve figured out so far. I am in the office tomorrow and Friday.
This page
How to navigate Perusall with a keyboard and enable read-aloud – Perusall<https://support.perusall.com/hc/en-us/articles/360049314893-How-to-navigate-Perusall-with-a-keyboard-and-enable-read-aloud>
Is a complete guide to using it with the keyboard, but below are the things you need to know to use it with NVDA.
First in your browser, Chrome or Edge, you need to turn caret browsing on. The caret is a cursor, and by default browsers don’t use an editing cursor. Toggle it on or off with F7 (function key F7) and all screen readers will read the dialog that pops up.
Now that the caret browsing mode is on, you can highlight text by holding the shift and using the arrow keys, just as if you were selecting text in a document.
But there’s a bit of a snag with a screen reader, which has its own ability to select text and that’s on by default. With NVDA, you need to turn “native selection” on with the NVDA key and Shift and F10, (Function key F10). So on your laptop, you’d hold the shift, the caps lock and the F10 keys.
Once that’s done you can stay in NVDA’s Browse mode, find some text, and select it with the shift and arrow keys.
That works really, really well. (It does not work in Focus mode; actually it does, but you cannot hear what you highlighted!)
Anytime you highlight text, to comment on it you press Enter. You now are automatically moved to the comments pane of the site, and the screen reader will show you what text you are commenting on, which helps to know if you selected the right thing.
There’s an edit box to type in your comment and it can be a bit tricky to find because there’s also an enormous toolbar for formatting, and the screen reader wants to read it. But you can press E which is single letter navigation to go to an edit box, press Enter, and you are now in Focus mode and able to type in your comment, tab to submit and submit it.
That’s how you do it, but a few more tips are good to know.
First, if you are in the comments pane, you can use heading level navigation to get to any other comments or the repetition of the text the comments there refer to. Heading navigation doesn’t work very well when you are looking through the text though you can jump to particular pages with the keyboard.
Second,  I found when I took a course using Perusal, that I waited for other folks to comment, and then I simply went to their comments and added my own. It was way easier than highlighting and adding annotations about something not yet highlighted. And it’s also real fun to see and comment on what others are saying; the whole point of annotating as a group rather than having to do it all on your own. Just be sure you say something new and not just parrot what others have said.
When I wanted to do this, I selected the radio button for “All comments” or “all unread comments” and then they were all together for me to move through and respond to. Control-Shift-Y goes to the next one no matter what filter you selected with the radio buttons that let you pick the kinds of comments you want to appear.
Holding control and Shift and H toggles between the document you are highlighting and the comments pane so you don’t have to try to find either of these using speech. Control Shift and A displays all comments so you don’t need to locate the radio buttons. Using the tab key can move between links but isn’t that useful; the interface has way too much stuff that’s not considered a link.
Some of Perusal’s keystrokes do conflict with NVDA so if something doesn’t work, try it in focus mode, then return to browse mode to actually read. (In focus mode you only read what’s in the current control like an edit box, list box or some other form field which expects interaction.)
If you need to remain in browse mode because you have to read the surrounding content, you can pass the next keystroke through with NVDA+F2. That is, hold the caps lock key and press function key 2, then press the Perusal keystroke.
Perusal has a read out loud feature. This can be useful if you just want to hear everything but it doesn’t tell you where you are located in the text. And if the text is not accessible; that is, it’s an image and not actual text, the read out loud will render it as garbage. You can however open that panel to choose voices on your computer and also the rate, and you can also close that panel.
I know this is all very complicated. Using a screen reader itself can consume an entire quarter’s training course.
Now, here are the Perusal-supplied keystrokes that help you get around what for me is a verbally very, very cluttered interface. Note the person who wrote this list was using a Mac; on Windows use Control where the instructions read command.

  *   ? - Toggle the cheat sheet
  *   Esc - Close the cheat sheet when open
  *   O then D - Open document
  *   O then A - Open assignment
  *   O then C - Open group or one-on-one chat
  *   G then H - Go to Course Home
  *   Left arrow - Navigate to previous page/section
  *   Right arrow - Navigate to next page/section
  *   ⌘ + Shift + Y - Read next thread
  *   ⌘ + Shift + U - Read next unread thread
  *   ⌘ + Shift + C - Open current conversation panel
  *   ⌘ + Shift + A - Open all conversations panel
  *   ⌘ + Shift + S - Open starred conversations panel
  *   ⌘ + Shift + M - Open thumbnails panel
  *   ⌘ + Shift + O - Open table of contents panel
  *   ⌘ + F - Open search panel
  *   ⌘ + Shift + I - Open notifications panel
  *   ⌘ + Shift + K - Open bookmarks panel
  *   ⌘ + Shift + X - Open notes panel
  *   ⌘ + Shift + E - Open read-aloud panel
  *   ⌘ + Shift + H - Toggle focus between highlighted text and comment editor
  *   ⌘ + Shift + Z - Move focus to main content area
—Debee


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