JAWS question about multi tasking

First a question—does JAWS have a setting that allows to ignore key presses during speech, including pressing Enter?

If so, you could start JAWS reading a document from top to bottom, or whatever portion you need read aloud, then alt tab over to Notepad or whatever you prefer to jot down notes in, and take your notes while JAWS continues reading until you manually stop it, likely with Control key.

Optionally, you may want to disable the speaking of typed characters and words, so as not to interupt your typing or have the speech overlapping.

Hope this makes sense.

Admittedly I use NVDA, and we can do this so I am hopeful that JAWS can as well. 😅

You can do this with NVDA? How? I would think it has the same focus changing and interrupting as other screen readers?

The closest I can come up with for JAWS is to use Select Braille View which allows you to divide the display into two regions where one can be in another window or buffer. If you have a Braille display you could try it? I don't know of a way to do this with speech only because switching windows will change focus and interrupt what was happening. The only real option would be to record the audio so you can play it back with a media player.

If you go into NVDA settings, down to keyboard. In here are settings for allowing NVDA to announce characters and/or words. As well. There are also 2 more checkboxes; Allowing Speech Interupt for typed characters, and Speech interupt for pressing Enter.

As for notetaking, there are a few note-taking addons; one in particular is Quick Notetaker.
It is outdated, but you can still make it work. Anyways, its been a while since I've used it, but there you go.

HTH.

If you are using Microsoft edge to display the document, you could use the immersive reader.
I forget the shortcut to activate it, but I believe it involves F9, maybe with a modifier.

It’s been a good bit since I’ve used windows, so don’t remember the shortcut off the top of my head.

You’re absolutely right about the 'F9' command. It has quite an impressive interface.

I don't know why I didn't think of this myself. This would actually be a lot easier than my trek above, and should be quite universal, meaning it would not matter which screen reader you were using. 😅

JAWS Cannot continuously read content from a window not in focus, at least not right now. However, Microsoft Word also has immersive reader and read aloud function. You can turn on the Immersive reader from the View tab, then control plus alt plus space will start reading. You can adjust voice settings and such, as well.

Can she take notes in a separate word document while that is going on? I think that was her original inquiry.

Comment removed by user

Strangely, even though the reading is being done by Microsoft's high quality TTS, trying to press keys while it reads does interrupt.

However, I did find that you can read a word document with Bookworm, and and it is not interrupted by switching windows or typing in another document!