Hi everyone. I have been trying to find a way to have JAWS continue reading a document in the background while I take notes on it in a different window. I’ve Googled and asked the FS companion, but it keeps giving me different answers, and none of the ways it said I could do it worked. Does anyone know if there is a way to do this?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
By Samanthia, 4 August, 2025
Forum
Windows
Comments
A possibility
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. 😅
Re: A possibility
You can do this with NVDA? How? I would think it has the same focus changing and interrupting as other screen readers?
JAWS Select Braille View
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.
@Travis Roth
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It is outdated, but you can still make it work.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.
Another alternative
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.
Re: Another Alternative
You’re absolutely right about the 'F9' command. It has quite an impressive interface.
Re: Immersive Reader
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. 😅
Thanks
Thanks for this idea. It could work if I opened a pdf in Edge instead of Adobe, but if I was reading a word document, I guess I would need to first convert it to a pdf, then open it in Edge, unless you can open dox files with Edge... Something to investigate.
Anyway, I would still like to know if anyone knows how to make JAWS do this, but I'll play around with your suggestion with emersive reader for now. Thanks again!