Punctuation Levels

Module 8.1.1.1: Punctuation Levels

Sometimes announcement of punctuation marks (colons, semi-colons, parentheses, etc.) can seem excessive, hindering your reading experience. With JAWS, you can choose among four levels of spoken punctuation: None: This is useful for casual reading of articles on the web or long Word documents that you are not editing yourself. Some: A limited set of punctuation marks are spoken. Most: This is the default. Among the most important punctuation marks included here, but not in Some, are colons, semi-colons, parentheses, and quotes. All: This is useful when editing text. In Quick Settings, punctuation levels can be changed for individual applications, while they can only be changed globally in Settings Center. Most of the time, you will be interested in changing them temporarily for a single program. Consequently, we will only cover changing them in Quick Settings. Steps to change to None to make for a better casual reading experience are: Open the application for which you want to change punctuation levels. Press Insert V to open Quick Settings. Type the first two or three letters of the word “punctuation” in the search box. Down arrow to Punctuation level where the default is Most. Press the Spacebar a couple of times to “None.” Pressing the Spacebar here cycles through the four options. Tab to the OK button and press Enter to make the change. You may find it useful to change punctuation levels to All if you are proofreading a Word document or an email message. This will enable you to hear all the punctuation. When finished with None or All, you may want to change this setting back to Most or Some. A shortcut key to temporarily change punctuation levels was introduced in JAWS 2021. The keystroke is Insert Shift 2. Press this keystroke repeatedly to cycle through the four levels. In this context, “temporary” means that punctuation levels will revert back to the default level when you navigate away from the current window. This is a useful feature because you are often only interested in making a change on the fly. In the Settings Center, you can customize which punctuation marks are spoken at each level, as well as get a comprehensive list of what is currently spoken at each level. As of the creation of this course, there were 193 punctuation marks listed. To access this list and make any changes: Starting in any application, press Insert 6 to open the Settings Center. Press Control Shift D to make a default change for all applications. This is required if you access Punctuation in the Settings Center. Type “punctuation” in the search box. Note that typing just the first two or three letters is sufficient to make the full word appear. Down arrow to Customize punctuation and press the Spacebar. Down arrow through the list to hear each punctuation mark and the current level at which it is spoken. To change the level where a particular punctuation mark is spoken, press the Spacebar to cycle through the four choices. Stop when you get to your choice. Down arrow to the next punctuation mark for which you want to change the level at which it is spoken, and repeat the previous step. When finished making your changes, Tab to the OK button and press Enter.