Susie, I wonder if the person who created the file has put a text box in the middle of the document? This would be the shape you are aware of. I find that in Word, text boxes can be difficult to read. In say all mode, sometimes they are skipped completely, sometimes I get a bit of it. Navigating back to read the content more slowly, line at a time, is also difficult, as Jaws will just skip the box. I find this happens in both RTF and DOC files. It might help to save as TXT , which strips out all fancy formatting. Worth a try anyway. Failing that, go back to the originator and ask for the file without fancy formatting functions. Hope this helps. Ken