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Hi everybody. This week I'd like to share something that I recently learned which will enable you to more quickly skip through Things like long YouTube videos or other audio material that you run into on the web. Then I want to show you a way that you can use your voice to have Jaws do commands for you without having to worry about typing them to start off. As I'm sure you all know already, Jaws has a whole bunch of configuration managers. Their big one, the one you probably use all the time, is the Settings Center. That's where you change much of the way Jaws is handled. Things like verbosity, speech and Braille settings, Web browser settings. You get the idea. Now, besides the Setting center, there are other managers like Dictionary Manager, Keyboard Manager, Script Manager, and a whole bunch more. If you're curious now and you want to see a list of all the available Jaws managers, what you do is you press jaws key +F2 okay, so you're probably guessing where I'm going here. The first topic I'm going to talk to you about is having to do with one of these Jaws managers. Before I begin, though, I want to say something about how I'm going to be talking commands. A lot of times I'm going to say JAWS key as part of whatever command you want to type. If you're using a laptop key layout, when I say Jaws key, you would press the caps lock. If you're using the desktop keyboard layout, the key you would press is the Numpad insert key. Okay, so now we got that out of the way, let's talk about the Jaws Manager that I'm thinking of, and I don't think it's one that you hear too much about. It's called the Navigation Quick Key Manager. To get to it, you would press jaws key plus F2 to bring up the list of managers. Then arrow down until you get to something called Navigation Quick Keys Manager. You can also press the letter N and that will take you straight to Navigation Quick Key Manager without having to have to arrow down. Once you're on it, press Enter to open it. What you'll find here is a list of all the possible Quick keys you could use when you're navigating a web page like H for heading, T for table, F for form control, and so on. And most of the items here do have letters already assigned to them, but if you go down through the list, you'll see an item near the bottom that says Slider unassigned. What's a slider? Well, a slider is what is used to move back and forth through through a video like on YouTube. It also is used when you want to raise and lower the volume control as you're playing through the website. If you assign a key to this slider, what will happen is when you press that key after starting the video, you will be taken to either the Seek slider where you could move playback backwards or forward, or it would take you to the volume slider if there is one. Keep pressing this quick key and it'll take you back and forth between the sliders. When you want to assign a key or in order to assign a key, what you would do in the Quickie Manager, you press tab once to get to the Edit Keys button and then press space to activate that button. You have four choices, two of which the period and the comma. I'm not sure work very well. I recommend you use either the left or right bracket keys. I have mine assigned to right bracket, which is right next to the Backspace key and easy enough to find. Once you've assigned it, then you tab to the OK button and press Enter. So now when you're on either slider, when you're listening to the video, you press Enter to activate Forms mode and then you can use arrow keys to move backwards and forwards along the slider. Another thing to think about sometimes Jaws will tend to chatter a lot when you're on the Playback slider. What you might want to think about doing is use the Insert or Jaws key plus space S as in speech to change how Jaws speaks to speech on demand rather than having it speak all the time. This will avoid a lot of the chatter that you will get sometimes when you're going through these sliders. When you want to go back to the way Jaws speaks normally you do that Jaws key plus space and S again and that'll take you back to having Jaws speak the way you normally have it. Okay, now about using your voice to have Jaws do things for you. It's called Voice Assistant. You have to have a microphone either built into your computer or plugged into it in order to make it work. And the other thing to know is that Voice Assistant is not enabled when you first install it, you have to activate it or enable it. And to do that you would go to the JAWS main menu, then Utilities, then down to Voice Assistant. And then there's a settings option under there where you would enable it. Once you do that, you can invoke the voice assistant either by saying, hey Sharkey, that's a takeoff, hey Siri, I guess, or you can use JAWS key alt space. Either way, you'll hear a chime and what you want to do is wait a second or two and then you can say a command. You can do things like say what time is it? You can say what's today's date? If you say System Tray, this will bring up a list of all the items in your system tray. It's like pressing jaws key plus F11. You could also do Window list, or you could say Window list, which is the same as doing jaws key plus F10. You can say Battery if you're on a laptop and want to know the battery status, how charged it is, all kinds of things you can do. There are also commands for many different tests that you perform, like working with Word or working on the web or even in Outlook. You can even change speech settings. You can even say restart Jaws if you get stuck. I've actually done it. If you want to get a list of all the different voice assistant commands available, go to Jaws Help. There's a topic in there all about Voice Assist and it will list all of the commands that you can possibly say. It's quite an extensive list and it's really, really a very nice feature. Okay, that's it for this week. I hope that you have found either or both of these tips useful. And remember that if there's anything about JAWS that you'd like to hear more about, please don't hesitate to send us an email. Send it to Feedback, Mute Show. Enjoy the rest of your day.