Hi Asanda
Your post brings back memories for me when first checking out Audacity. There
is a lot to learn, but it is well worth it.
I was also quite dismayed when checking out the keyboard section of the manual
to find, exactly as you said, that so many commands are listed as unassigned.
That is not correct.
I will list a few here to get you started and will then tell you have to find
keyboard commands.
Spacebar Starts and stops playback (see below)
R Starts recording (press spacebar to stop)
Shift+r Starts recording on a second or subsequent track
Enter Toggles selection of current track
Up arrow Moves to previous track
Down arrow Moves to next track
J Cursor to start of track
K Cursor to end of track
Shift+j Selects to beginning of track
Shift+k Selects to end of track
[ Places cursor at that point when playing; opens
a dialog to select position when stopped
] Sets end of highlighting when playing; opens a
dialog to allow adjustment of end of selection when stopped
With your screen reader adjusted appropriately, you can find many keyboard
commands by going through the menus, activated with the alt key etc.
For a full list of assigned and unassigned commands, open Preferences with
control+p and press k. As you will discover, you can look through the entire
list of commands. You can also choose to search by key or name (tree). Now
for something important (and irritating). Not all commands are active by
default. To fix this, having press k for keyboard, tab until you reach
Defaults. Press spacebar and press down arrow to Full and press Enter. Then
tab to Ok and press Enter.
David Bailes has written a Guide to Audacity
<https://vip.chowo.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/jaws/Audacity-2.4.0-Guide.html>
for JAWS users which is relevant to users of other Windows screen readers. If
you like audio tutorials, the files on the page
<https://www.sendspace.com/folder/xusytz> I listed in my reply to Hettie may
also be of interest.
By all means get back to us with further questions. Collectively there are
probably hundreds of years of experience on the List.
Andrew
From: audacity4blind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <audacity4blind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On Behalf Of Asanda Pavlacka
Sent: Sunday, 27 September 2020 11:46 AM
To: audacity4blind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [audacity4blind] getting started
Hi, so I am brand new to all this. To be quite honest, I find the help page
from audacity about accessibility and keyboard shortcuts incredibly unhelpful.
I found a list of keyboard commands there, most of the important ones for
getting started are listed as unassigned, which isn't useful for helping me
navigate if there are no assigned keyboard commands to the basic functions. I
did read somewhere that either spacebar or shift R should start recording but I
don't believe it worked. The recording start and finish all stayed at 0 after
supposedly recording something. Any help as to where I can find a comprehensive
list of key commands that show something other than the unassigned label?
If I click off the accessibility page in the audacity manual online they revert
back to saying click on this screen element, which of course is not helpful
when I'm attempting to find out how to do things with key commands only. It
appears I'm connected up with my mic all right although if there are multiple
steps to integrating everything that I might be missing that could be useful to
know also.
Any help is appreciated.
Asanda
