Does NVDA have something Similar to this?

By Maldalain, 28 May, 2025

Forum
Windows

My left hand isn't in the best condition, and constantly pressing the left Control key on my Windows laptop tends to make it worse. In contrast, my Mac offers a much more comfortable experience thanks to the Arrow QuickNav rotor, which makes it easy to navigate through misspellings, paragraphs, lines, words, characters, and more without relying heavily on modifier keys.
I'm wondering—does NVDA have a similar feature?
Thanks in advance for any help!

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Comments

By Justin Harris on Wednesday, May 28, 2025 - 13:28

Hi there,
I'm not aware of anything specific, like a one handed mode or anything like that, but with NVDA, you honestly need to use modifiers much less anyway, as usually basic navigation can be done with arrows, tab, etc. Also, I've never used it, but Windows does have a feature for sticky keys, so that could help you in the cases where it is needed.
As for modifiers, there's also a lot less to worry about. On a laptop, just your caps lock, and even then, unless you're using the NVDA equivalent of the virtual cursor, which I forget what NVDA calls it, but unless you're doing that, or getting system info such as time, battery status, etc, or entering the NVDA menu, you rarely have to use that caps lock modifier. That's one thing I like about NVDA navigation, as with Voiceover, arrow key navigation with quicknav is super buggy. In some apps it works, in others, it works sometimes, and sometimes not, and just isn't very consistent, where navigation with NVDA is pretty much always the same.

By SeasonKing on Thursday, May 29, 2025 - 05:28

I just tried, it works as advertised.
Only thing it's missing is navigate by paragraphs. I use that allot.
I can add it myself if I decide to go in to source-code, but, too laisy about that.

By Brian on Thursday, May 29, 2025 - 06:28

I meant to mention this above, but besides the link I provided, you can also get this directly from the add-on store. Press NVDA plus 'n', then 't', and finally 'a' to go directly to the add-on store from within NVDA.
From the add-on store, press control tab two times, to get to the list of available add-ons to download. Pressing 'e' inside the list will take you to add-on to beginning with that letter, and you can just arrow down until you find 'Easy Navigation'.

HTH. :-)

By Maldalain on Friday, May 30, 2025 - 18:04

Thanks all for commenting. I will check it out and come back with findings.

By Maldalain on Friday, May 30, 2025 - 18:15

It is Shift+backslash to activate, I press those, but nothing happens. Could anyone tell me how to use this ad-on?

By Brian on Friday, May 30, 2025 - 18:38

Use easy navigation as follows:
1. Press Shift plus Backspace (not backslash) to toggle on/off. You will hear high-pitched beeps when activated, low pitch beeps when deactivated.
2. Press Left Arrow/Right Arrow to navigate between -- Headings, Links, Unvisited Links, Visited Links, Form Fields, Buttons, Edit Fields, Check boxes, Combo Boxes, Radio Buttons, Images, Lists, List Items, Tables, Frames, Articles, Landmarks, Seperators, Quotes, Objects, Text Blocks, Searches, and Lines.
3. Press Up Arrow/Down Arrow to navigate by your choice above, i.e. if you chose Headings, pressing Up and Down would go between Next and Previous Heading respectively.

You can of course choose what items you want access to, and if you want to switch functionality between left/right arrow versus up/down arrow.

My favorite function with this is the "Searches" function. Instead of Control plus NVDA plus 'f', set Easy Nav to "Searches" and just press up or down arrow. 😀