Transcription of Microsoft Teams with JAWS Presentation

The below transcript is of an audio presentation relating to the JAWS scripts for Microsoft Teams from Hartgen Consultancy. Every effort has been made to ensure the text accurately represents an exact copy of the audio presentation.

Brian Hartgen: Hello everyone. I'm Brian from Hartgen Consultancy. The business world is always buzzing about which hot new collaboration platform is the best. There certainly are quite a lot of options to choose from. But one particularly useful solution stands out: Microsoft Teams. This great collaboration solution is ideal for businesses, freelancers, and just about everyone else who works in a professional team setting.
Microsoft have made great strides in ensuring the application in the most part is accessible within the context of a range of assistive technologies. For example, various statements are often sent to the screen-reader to assist with tasks. Some script files are built into the JAWS screen-reader to support Microsoft Teams. However, we would suggest that while the messages and procedures available are helpful, they do not improve efficiency.

Our JAWS scripts for Microsoft Teams focus upon several key areas. They provide information in a concise format so you become ultra efficient. They ensure that aspects of Teams which are not easily navigable via the keyboard are accessible. They provide an interface which is as easy to use as possible. And finally, there must be no compromising on speed and responsiveness. If there is any chance of a significant delay between a keystroke being pressed and receiving speech and braille output, it is probably best not to do it at all.

I would primarily like to show you some of the features available in the scripts for Teams. In the next demonstration, I will show you features for Outlook, which you also receive with the package.

There are lots of things which JAWS already does very well within Microsoft Teams. And I will not focus on those. I will only talk about the differences these scripts provide.

The first thing I will do is press a hot key, which will do one of two things. If Teams is not running, it will start the application. If it is, it will set focus to it from any running program or Windows environment.
JAWS: Chat Microsoft Teams.

Brian Hartgen: One possible problem many of us face when working in Teams is how much information is spoken as you navigate message lists and tree view items.
JAWS: Level one, Winning Teams Team, new messages, favorited. Hit Space for more options, hold Shift and Control to select this Team for reordering. Open has pop-up. One of three. General channel and Winning Teams Team, favorited. Hit Space for more options has pop-up. One of four.

Brian Hartgen: As you move through a list or open a tree branch for example, what you often want to hear is the information in an abbreviated form. This you can now do. Here I have my tree branch of Teams, and you'll hear that the first item is closed.
JAWS: Winning Teams Team new messages, closed.
Brian Hartgen: I'm going to press the right arrow.
JAWS: Winning Teams Team new messages, favorited, open.
Brian Hartgen: You should already notice if you're paying attention that we are not receiving any extraneous or superfluous information as we open the tree branch. Let's down arrow.
JAWS: General channel in Winning Teams Team. Meet and greet channel in Winning Teams Team, new messages.
Brian Hartgen: I'm deliberately pausing because that is where the information would have been spoken, what I might call the tutorial information.
JAWS: Script suggestions channel in Winning Teams Team. Teams tips and tricks channel in Winning Teams Team.
Brian Hartgen: And we're about to go to the next team.
JAWS: Hartgen Consultancy team, closed.
Brian Hartgen: And we could expand that.
JAWS: Hartgen Consultancy Team, favorited, open.

Brian Hartgen: Let's move to the chat area, and we should experience something very similar.
JAWS: Chat, group chat, Morning Drinks, user added on 24/04.
Brian Hartgen: Let's arrow through some of this.
JAWS: Meeting chat, audio production lesson one, offline. Last message from you test on 26/04. (Mute Sound). Meeting chat, supervision offline. This chat is muted, user added.
Brian Hartgen: Did you hear that little sound as I navigated to the individual chat message? That indicates the chat is muted. The same equally applies to the Microsoft Teams calendar.
JAWS: Calendar, calendar grid view, 16 May 7th: 30-16 May 8th: 00, zero events.

Brian Hartgen: As I navigated to the Teams calendar by pressing Control+4, you heard JAWS give an additional prompt to confirm that I am there. It could be that the organization you represent has the keystroke of Control+4 assigned to a different app within Teams, such as assignments within an educational establishments. If this is the case, you can change the prompts if it's helpful.

Now that I'm here, I can navigate the day view by pressing the left and the right arrow keys. Let's hear the original output from JAWS first.
JAWS: 18 May 10:00 to 18 May 10:30, zero events. 19 May 10:00 to 19 May 10:30, zero events. 20 May 10:00 to 20 May 10:30, one events. Press Tab to navigate to the events.
Brian Hartgen: What you really want is to hear the date on which you're focused, followed by how many events there may be.
JAWS: 17 May, 18 May, 19 May, 20 May, one event.

Brian Hartgen: As you move up or down through the available times, you only want to hear the time slots followed by how many events which exist at that time. The scripts provide this information. Again, here is the original output.
JAWS: 21 May 10:00 to 21 May 10:30, zero events. 20 May 10:00 to 20 May 10:30, one events. Press Tab to navigate to the events.
Brian Hartgen: Now we will hear it in abbreviated form.
JAWS: 8:30, 9:00, 9:30, 10:00, one event.

Brian Hartgen: Being able to customize the information that JAWS provides makes a huge difference in terms of how much you can achieve throughout the course of a day. I can't emphasize this strongly enough. Of course, if you want to, you can always revert back to the standard output.

Before I move into a Teams chat, I want to set my status. One of the areas the scripts focus on is to provide you with keystrokes so as to move to key areas of the program. These are used for purposes of speed, but also to serve as good orientation points so you can always get back to a known location. Now, these keystrokes are especially helpful in both calls and meetings. If you cannot remember these keystrokes, you have some tools at your disposal. You can press insert with H or in the case of a laptop keyboard, Alt+Windows+H for a list of JAWS specific keystrokes following Vispero good practice. Alternatively, you can activate a list box containing a specific category of keystrokes. These are not necessarily JAWS specific. You can then arrow down to the one which interests you and press Enter so as to carry it out. We have several categories that you can access depending upon the situation in which you find yourself, general, navigation, messaging, and calls and meetings.
JAWS: General keystrokes dialogue, go to search Control+E, show command Control+/.
Brian Hartgen: Note that as I navigate the list, the keystroke is announced or displayed in braille together with the item that it represents. This means that you can get to learn the keystrokes for future use. To repeat, if you want to carry out one of these keystrokes, just press Enter on it.

One of these keystrokes is to reach your profile area. This allows you to do a number of things, including setting your status. This keystroke can be pressed from anywhere within Teams.
JAWS: Profile app settings and more, button menu, your profile picture with status displayed as available, app version is available.
Brian Hartgen: I'll press Enter.
JAWS: Menu available.
Brian Hartgen: And I can change my status right away. I'll press down arrow.
JAWS: Busy. Do not disturb.
Brian Hartgen: I think busy would be suitable for the time being. I'll press up arrow.
JAWS: Busy.
Brian Hartgen: And press Enter.
JAWS: Leaving menus.
Brian Hartgen: And it should be set to busy. If I press that same keystroke again.
JAWS: Profile app settings and more, button menu, menu, current status as busy, your profile picture with status displayed as busy.
Brian Hartgen: There are plenty of other options that you can control on that menu. So it is important to get back to it as in when you want to do so. I'll come to some more of these keystrokes as we head into a Teams call. But for now, let's head to chat.

We've already heard some of the facilities within chat as we've experienced working through the list of messages in an abbreviated form. Now I have two ladies with me throughout these two demonstrations, Lulu and Lacey. Throughout both demonstrations, I will be receiving messages from them in some form. I'll first send a message to Lacey.
JAWS: Type a new message, Editing edit.
Brian Hartgen: Hi Lacey. How are you today?
JAWS: Sending dot dot dot. Message sent.

Brian Hartgen: Now Lacey is going to reply. Our scripts announce who is typing a message and optionally you will hear a typing sound indicator. Both the name and the sound can be enabled or disabled with a keystroke. This is critical because when activity is busy, the likelihood is that you might want to disable these indications very quickly.
JAWS: (Typing Sound Indicator). Lacey Hartgen is typing. (End of Typing Sound Indicator). Message from Lacey Hartgen. I am very well, thanks. How about you?
Brian Hartgen: If the setting is disabled, we can still check if anyone is typing a message. I'll disable it now.
JAWS: No information is given when the message is being composed.
Brian Hartgen: And now let's press the keystroke F12, which tells us whether someone is typing or not.
JAWS: No one is typing.

Brian Hartgen: Lacey will begin to type now. While she is typing, I will press function key F12.
JAWS: Lacey Hartgen is typing.

Brian Hartgen: There is one other aspect of chat I would like to demonstrate. I'm going to ask Lacey to send us a message which contains a hyperlink. Now I paused the recording before Lacey sent that message. I've restarted again, and I'm still in the chat edit box. I can press Shift+Tab at this point, or if I was elsewhere in the chat window, I can press Alt+Windows+M.
JAWS: Message from Lacey Hartgen. Today I will go shopping on this website, link http//www.amazon.co.uk, sent today at 8:00.
Brian Hartgen: That keystroke sets focus to the messeging area. What if I want to follow Lacey's example and I want to go to that particular website? Well, there is a convoluted way of being able to do that from a keyboard standpoint within Teams. But what I can do is press F9. And this virtualizes any control that you may be focused on within Teams. In other words, it's going to make it possible for you to use the arrow keys in order to move through that content. This is useful to check spellings of names, et cetera. Or in fact, if you're in any doubt as to the meaning of the control, you can virtualize it by pressing F9. But our virtualized control keystroke is somewhat different. Let me press that now.
JAWS: Current item, message from Lacey Hartgen.
Brian Hartgen: Okay. I've just stopped it reading so that we can go through it.
JAWS: Message from Lacey Hartgen. Today I will go shopping on this website. Visited link http//www.amazon.co.uk.
Brian Hartgen: You'll notice that it's saying visited link there because Amazon is a website that I happen to frequent quite a lot. So I can press Enter on this right now.
JAWS: Http//www.amazon.co.uk, visited link. Amazon.co.uk low prices and electronics.
Brian Hartgen: And the Amazon website is now displayed in my browser. I can just press Alt+F4 if I want to close that down and I return to my message which is virtualized. I can then press Escape in order to return to Microsoft Teams.

Let's now head into a call and show you a few tricks here.
JAWS: Lacey Hartgen is calling you. Accept with audio. Press Control+Shift+S to accept audio call. Decline call. Press Control+Shift+D to decline call.
Brian Hartgen: I think we'll answer it.
JAWS: You have joined the meeting. Lacey Hartgen is in the call, using customized setup.

Brian Hartgen: As I said earlier, we have keystrokes to set focus to or provide you with important information in both meetings and calls which are identical. Good examples would be show participants, move to conversation, which is the chat area, more actions and so on. We have a keystroke to announce the elapsed time of a meeting or call.
JAWS: Lacey Hartgen, elapsed time 39 seconds.
Brian Hartgen: And to advise you of the status of muted audio or video output.
JAWS: Audio is not muted. Video is disabled.
Brian Hartgen: Particularly those last two items are very important so as to avoid getting into some embarrassing situations.

The notification of raised hands in meetings is an important consideration as well. If you're presenting, there is a strong likelihood that you do not wish to hear about these. But when you are ready to take questions, it could be important. You can enable or disable the automatic announcement of people who have a hand raised. You can also press a standard Teams keystroke to advise you of how many hands are raised together with the participant names. That is Control+Shift+L. But if you press it twice quickly, you can place it into the JAWS virtual viewer so as to check spelling and work through the participants at a slower pace if necessary.

Meeting and call windows can get fairly busy. So the purpose of having these shortcut keys is to try and avoid you having to press Tab or Shift+Tab to move to different areas of the window, if at all possible. As someone who hosts meetings and webinars, I know how important these features and keystrokes are, particularly when presenting. If I'm in a professional setting, especially working alongside sighted people, the last thing I want is to appear as though I am not on an equal footing with them. If I'm asked to do something in that meeting, I want to be able to do it at the same speed and with equal confidence as they can do. These keystrokes and features help me do that.

I'm going to end the call now with Control+Shift+B.
JAWS: Leaving dot dot dot Lacey Hartgen Microsoft Team. (The end part of this prompt was cut).
Brian Hartgen: But who called me last and at what time?
JAWS: Lacey Hartgen called you on 16 May 2021 at 8:14.

Brian Hartgen: If you are busy within a place of work, the chances are high that you will want to be alerted to anything which arrives by email or through Teams in the form of messages or notification of events. Our scripts allow for just such a situation. From any application based upon what you hear as a result or read in braille, you can take action on it if you wish to do so. As someone who receives many messages per day, I've been pleased to use these features.

When a notification arrives from Microsoft Outlook, it can be quite long. It will include the author, the subject, and a preview of the message. We did feel sometimes this could be a little lengthy. So this feature has three options, and you can control them by pressing the JAWS key with Space, then Control+A. Once you've pressed JAWS key with Space then Control+A, to rotate between the three available options, you do not need to press the JAWS key with Space again. You can just press Control+A until you reach the setting that you want. And it is possible that you will want to change these on a fairly regular basis. Let me show you what we have.

So I'll press JAWS key with Space. That's insert space in my case, and now Control+A.
JAWS: You will be advised of new notifications in full.
Brian Hartgen: So you will be advised of new notifications in full. If I press Control+A again.
JAWS: You will not be advised of new notifications.
Brian Hartgen: You will not be advised of new notifications. So Control+A once more.
JAWS: Notifications will be abbreviated.
Brian Hartgen: Notifications will be abbreviated.

The first thing we're going to do is to do some work here in Teams. So Lacey will send us a new message and we can see what happens with it. Before she sends us that message though, I'm going to sneak off work a little bit, and I'm going to do a little bit of internet shopping here. So I'm just going to hop on over to Amazon.
JAWS: Amazon.co.uk, low prices and electronics, books, sports equipment and more Brave.

Brian Hartgen: Okay. So here I am on the Amazon web page. So just to summarize, at the moment I have Microsoft Outlook running, gathering my emails. I have Teams open as well. I've got my web page, and I think that's it, apart from JAWS running at the moment. But you could have any number of windows open, but Teams must be running at this point. So she is now going to send the message and we'll listen to what happens.
JAWS: Microsoft Teams Lacey Hartgen.
Brian Hartgen: And that's all it said, Microsoft Teams, Lacey Hartgen. Now we have a number of things that we could do with this. We could press JAWS key with Space, then Control+1 through to Control+0 to hear each of the last 10 notifications. Insert Space, Control+1.
JAWS: Microsoft Teams Lacey Hartgen, good morning everybody. Brian, stop shopping and start working!
Brian Hartgen: Even though we had the abbreviated form spoken, that was just to get our attention. But when we press one of these keystrokes, it will announce the message in full. What that means is that if we're working on something really important, but we get an email message or something from Teams, and we're expecting an urgent message, we don't need to move from our focus location, which is the web page. We can examine that right there and we can get a full description of what that message is about without leaving where we are. And if it's not the one that we're interested in, then we can just carry on working, without having to move anywhere.
Ordinarily you would have perhaps had to Alt+Tab to find Microsoft Teams, get into your chat area, get into the messages, open it up and find out what it was about. You don't need to do that here.

Now you can press that keystroke twice quickly if you want to virtualize it. So that's insert Space followed by Control+1 twice quickly.
JAWS: Microsoft Teams Lacey Hartgen. Good morning everybody. Brian, stop (The end part of that prompt was cut).
Brian Hartgen: And I can arrow through that now.
JAWS: Shopping, and start working.
Brian Hartgen: Perfect. Press Escape.
JAWS: Amazon-

Brian Hartgen: If you press insert Space or JAWS key with Space followed by Control+dash that is going to virtualize all of the notifications that have been captured during the JAWS session. In other words, if JAWS has been running for quite a period, you're going to see all those notifications there, if you really wanted to do that. There may be some use cases for it. In fact, I'm sure there are.

So we're now going to do exactly the same with Microsoft Outlook. A message is going to be sent to my email account, brian@hartgenconsultancy.com. And we should get notification of it.
JAWS: Outlook Lulu Hartgen.
Brian Hartgen: Perfect. It said Outlook Lulu Hartgen. Let's just review that, shall we? Insert Space followed by Control+1.
JAWS: Outlook Lulu Hartgen, just checking in. Hi, now you are in the office, I just wanted to see if everything is okay this morning. Would you like me to bring you a coffee?
Brian Hartgen: Where are we?
JAWS: Amazon.co.uk, low prices and electronics-
Brian Hartgen: We're still on the web page at this point. Now it gets better because if you wanted to interact with that message, you can from wherever you are jump straight into it, whether it comes from Teams or Outlook.

I am going to get that email message sent again in a moment. But first of all, we will get a notification from Teams. We're still on the web page and we'll find out how we can do this. We will be pressing JAWS key with Space, followed by Control+N for November in order to get right into the notification. So where are we?
JAWS: Amazon.co.uk.
Brian Hartgen: Let's get Lacey to send the message, shall we?
JAWS: Microsoft Teams Lacey Hartgen.
Brian Hartgen: What is that message?
JAWS: Microsoft Teams Lacey Hartgen. I haven't heard from you. What is happening?
Brian Hartgen: Insert Space, Control+N.
JAWS: Moving to application, Lacey Hartgen Microsoft Teams. Type a new message, editing edit.
Brian Hartgen: And we're straight into that message now.
JAWS: Title is Lacey Hartgen Microsoft Teams available.
Brian Hartgen: I pressed Insert+T. We can tell that Lacey is available so we can start typing back now. Okay, so I've written back to her.
JAWS: I am here, but I am just doing a demonstration.
Brian Hartgen: I'll press Enter on this.
JAWS: Sending dot dot dot, message sent.
Brian Hartgen: Now, if I press insert Space and Control+1.
JAWS: Me. I am here but I am just doing a demonstration.
Brian Hartgen: That's the message that I sent. Now she'll begin to type back.
JAWS: (Typing Sound Indicator). Lacey Hartgen is typing. Message from Lacey Hartgen. That's okay then. I thought there was something wrong. (End of Typing Sound Indicator).
Brian Hartgen: Insert Space, Control+1.
JAWS: Lacey Hartgen, that's okay then. I thought there was something wrong.
Brian Hartgen: And insert Space, Control+2.
JAWS: Me, I am here, but I am just doing a demonstration.

Brian Hartgen: What happens at that point? We finished talking to Lacey. What can we do from here? We can press insert Space followed by Control+B for back.
JAWS: Use virtual PC cursor on. amazon.co.uk, low prices and electronics, books, sports equipment and more.
Brian Hartgen: And here we are right back on the web page where we were before. So we can continue our shopping. We call this feature ClickBoom, because you click into the message, do what you need to, press a keystroke, and boom, you're back where you need to be.

Now, shall we do the same in Outlook? I'm going to get that message sent to us again that we had before, and we'll be able to get in and reply to it.
JAWS: Outlook Lulu Hartgen.
Brian Hartgen: There it is. So insert Space, Control+N.
JAWS: Moving to application, just checking in, message HTML, message.
Brian Hartgen: And here I am in the message.
JAWS: Hi. Blank. Now we are in the office. I just wanted to see if everything is okay this morning. Would you like me to bring you a coffee?
Brian Hartgen: And I can reply to that. Control+R.
JAWS: Re, just checking-
Brian Hartgen: Yes, please. That would be awesome. Control+Enter.
JAWS: Just checking in, message HTML.
Brian Hartgen: Escape, close that message down.
JAWS: Amazon.co.uk.

Brian Hartgen: Now, fortunately in that case, we were back on the webpage again, but if we weren't, then we could have pressed insert Space followed by Control+B to go back there. Maybe the focus hadn't gone back to the webpage. We were just fortunate.

So why don't the scripts present you with a simple edit field so you can type the message and then press Enter to send? Simply this. There is a high probability that you need to do something more than type a message. Your boss, for example, may want to access a spreadsheet that you have been working on and you need to send it as an attachment forming part of the reply to the message, or perhaps it could be a PowerPoint presentation. If that is the case, you will have needed to locate Microsoft Outlook and find the original message, then reply to it and attach the file. So the convenience of this feature is lost. It is much better to handle it this way, where you get maximum flexibility.

Now there's one other thing that I want to show you that you can do. So I'm going to go back over to Teams. Let's press Control+2 to go to our chat.
JAWS: Chat, Lacey Hartgen available. Last message from Lacey. That's okay then. I thought there was something wrong, dot dot-
Brian Hartgen: Now, this is the one that we want to bring out into a new window. We're going to pop out the chat. We're going to press Space on this.
JAWS: List, pop-out chat.
Brian Hartgen: And press Enter so we get this chat in a new window.
JAWS: New window Microsoft Teams.

Brian Hartgen: You might have quite a lot of windows open, but you might want to be corresponding with Lacey for most of the day. And you will want to get back to this window quickly, irrespective of how many windows there are open. So we can bookmark this window if we want to so we can easily get back to it.
JAWS key with Space followed by Windows key one through to Windows key five will allow us to bookmark up to five different windows. JAWS key with Space followed by Alt+1 through to Alt+5 will allow us to return to each of those windows previously bookmarked. If I now press JAWS key with Space followed by Windows key one.
JAWS: Set window one.
Brian Hartgen: That's bookmarked. So we can wander off and do whatever we want.
JAWS: General Hartgen Consultancy Microsoft Teams.
Brian Hartgen: There's Teams.
JAWS: Amazon.co.uk, low prices and electronics-
Brian Hartgen: We'll go back to our Amazon window, but as soon as we want to correspond with Lacey, we can press JAWS key with Space followed by Alt+1.
JAWS: Lacey Hartgen Microsoft Teams.
Brian Hartgen: And I'm right back in there. And in fact I should be in the edit field.
JAWS: Type a new message, edit.
Brian Hartgen: And I am.

The JAWS scripts for Microsoft Teams and Outlook will be available before the end of May, 2021. In addition, we have an archive of a series of webinars available with over nine hours of training on the use of Microsoft Teams. Head on over to www.hartgen.org/teams or to pre-order the JAWS scripts only you can head to www.hartgen.org/teamsscripts, all one word.

Use Microsoft Teams in the most efficient way with JAWS and Hartgen Consultancy. Thank you for listening.