The Accessibility Menu in Google Docs- The Speak Menu

In this video, I look into the Accessibility Menu in Google Docs. I review the keyboard shortcuts that can be used as part of the speak menu.

The video comes with a full set of subtitles but if you prefer to read a transcript, you can find it below.

Start of Video Transcript

Hello everyone. It is James from the Visual Impairment Team in Devon.

In this video I am going to demonstrate part of the Accessibility menu in Google Docs.

Google Docs is part of Google Drive- Google’s online storage system with a version of Microsoft Office built in.

The system is very accessible which is fantastic news because it is free and can be accessed on lots of different devices.

The Accessibility menu is a menu that only appears on a Document when you enable screen reader support. Otherwise it stays hidden.

A quick look at this document shows that it is nowhere to be seen.

To enable screen reader support, have your screen reader running and then with a Google Doc on your screen, press the Ctrl, Alt and Z keys all together.

Your screen reader should say “screen reader support enabled.”

At the same time to the right of the Help menu at the top of your page, a new menu appears called Accessibility.

The Accessibility menu is there to help a screen reader user to navigate and read a document.

When we open the accessibility menu there are 11 sub menus within it.

The first sub menu is “speak” which is what we will focus on in this video.

To hear your current selection spoken press Ctrl + Alt + X keys

To speak the selection formatting press Ctrl + Alt + A, then Ctrl + Alt + F

And to speak the cursor location, press Ctrl + Alt + A, then Ctrl + Alt + L.

To speak the table row and column headers press Ctrl + Alt + Shift + T, then Ctrl + Alt + Shift + H

To speak the table cell location press Ctrl + Alt + Shift + T, then Ctrl + Alt + Shift + N.

To speak the table row header, press Ctrl + Alt + Shift + T, then Ctrl + Alt + Shift + R

And finally to speak the table column header, press Ctrl + Alt + Shift + T, then Ctrl + Alt + Shift + C.

And that is it.

Thanks for watching this video demonstrating the 7 keyboard shortcuts that access the speak commands in the accessibility menu of Google Docs.

If it has helped you, please share it with your friends, colleagues and family.

If you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.

End of Video Transcript