HI Alan Dicey, The following will explain skim reading. -----Original Message----- Sent: Thursday, 26 February 2009 1:24 PM Skim Reading And Skim Reading With Summary How many times have you received a manual for a device or software in electronic form only to find that important passages or phrases are marked with bold or italic text? Even worse you have a huge document several hundred pages long you know has important information in it but it has no table of contents. A sighted person would simply flick the pages over or scroll the document down the screen until a phrase or text colour or font caught their eye. They'd then stop and read to see if it was what they were after. For a Braille user this is harder to do but can be done with practice. But how do you do it with speech only? In Jaws 6.0 a function called Skim Reading was introduced which allows you to do exactly the kind of thing sighted people can do so easily. If you're using Jaws version 6.0 I strongly suggest you update to 6.2 to get the full functionality of this feature. Jaws 6.2 is a free update for you and can be downloaded from http://www.freedomscientific.com/dowunloads/jaws/JAWS-previous-downloads .asp Skim reading will work in any word processor. It will even work in Note Pad or on a web page. To enter the Skim Reading dialog box press Control +Shift +Jaws Key +Down Arrow. The Jaws key is usually the Insert on the number pad unless you have changed your keyboard layout. If you're using the Laptop layout it's the Caps Lock. The skim reading feature is very powerful but simple enough to operate. When you first open the skim reading window you are on a series of 4 radio buttons. These switch between the various ways of reading. I will discuss them briefly below. If you keep pressing the Tab key you will cycle through 5 other options that appear regardless of the Skim Reading method selected. Skim Reading Indication When checked, this will cause Jaws to produce a sound while searching for text. This tells you that Jaws is still searching and is especially useful in large documents if the occurrences of the text are few. Start Skim Reading Pressing space or enter on this button closes the Skim Reading dialog box. Jaws will then start to read out any text matches it finds. Pressing the control key will silence jaws and halt the Skim Reading process. Create Summary This is probably the most useful way to Skim Read. This option will go through the entire document and dump any results into a separate window. Each result will be on it's own line and is a link. Pressing enter on any of these links will drop you back onto the document at the exact spot that text occurs. Close Pressing Space or Enter on this option will close the Skim Reading dialog without any further action. Help This will bring up the Jaws Help with information on the Skim Reading feature. As stated above there are 4 ways you can Skim Read in a document using Jaws. The first 2 really don't need any explanation: Read First Line Of Every Paragraph and Read First Sentence of Every Paragraph. The next 2 do need some explanation: Text Rules Apply For Reading This option allows you to search for every occurrence of a string of text in the document. Use the up and down arrow keys to select this option from the radio buttons then press tab. The Rules history combo box is extremely useful. Jaws actually remembers any rules you have defined in the past. Use the arrows to select a rule if you wish to use one of the ones you created earlier. Pressing Tab again gets you to the edit box to type in the text you want to search for. Press tab again and select either the line, sentence or paragraph depending on how you want the results displayed. You can then tab to the Skim Read or Create Summary buttons. There are more advanced ways of searching for text which I won't go into here. If you want more information on these you can download the Skim Reading tutorial from the Freedom Scientific web site. Download links are at the end of this FAQ. Attribute and colour Rules Apply For Reading This allows you to look for any text that has a particular colour or attribute such as Bold, Italic etc. most of this should be fairly self explanatory but More information can be found in the Skim Reading tutorial. There are 2 versions of the Skim Reading and Skim Reading With Summary tutorial. The first is in Daisy format and the second is in plain MP3 format. The direct download link for the Daisy book is: ftp://ftp.freedomscientific.com/users/hj/private/WebFiles/daisy/XTraSkim ReadingWithSummary.exe The direct download for the MP3 book is: ftp://ftp.freedomscientific.com/users/hj/private/WebFiles/JAWS/SkimReadi ngWithSummary.zip Regards, Danny Keogh Quantum Technology Phone: 03 9545 4102 Mobile: 0439 022 146 Email dkeogh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -- JFW related links: JFW homepage: http://www.freedomscientific.com/ Scripting mailing list: http://lists.the-jdh.com/listinfo.cgi/scriptography-the-jdh.com JFW List instructions: To post a message to the list, send it to jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send a message to jfw-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line. 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