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Category: technology

Unlock Windows Efficiency with PowerToys Run

Published November 13, 2024 by Kelly Ford

Sometimes you make a handy discovery that makes you wonder why you did not know about it long before. I just had that happen with PowerToys Run, one of the toys included in the full suite of items in the electronic toybox known as Windows PowerToys.

PowerToys are a set of utilities that allow you to customize different aspects of Windows and offer functionality that is not directly built in. You can learn more in general and find details on installation in a handy Microsoft Learn article.

I installed the most recent version of PowerToys because I had read about something new known as Advanced Paste. That is not the discovery though.

After installing PowerToys, I used one of my more common shortcuts in Windows Alt+Space to bring up the system menu for an application. That menu is where you find entries including restore, close and the one I often use, Maximize. My web browsing windows in particular often get sized quite small and with responsive design much of the content I’m expecting has disappeared so maximizing the browser window is necessary.

Imagine my surprise when instead of what I was expecting, my screen reader communicated, “query, edit.”

It turns out this is the default shortcut for the aforementioned PowerToys Run. In short, this is like having a command line to do everything from choosing between open windows on your computer to performing quick calculations, file, and web searches, browsing the Windows registry and more.

Using PowerToys run

Using PowerToys Run is fairly straight forward. Press Alt+Space, enter some text and arrow through the results. You can start your text with various text characters to direct PowerToys Run what you want to do. The full list of text to use here is detailed in a Microsoft Learn article.

Some examples I am finding I have already incorporated into my daily use include:

  • <, that is the less than symbol: Window Walker, to browse through all the open windows on your computer. Start pressing down arrow after entering the less than character, or add part of the window name and then down arrow to shorten the list.
  • $, that is the dollar sign character: Windows Settings to, as you would expect, browse through all the different settings for Windows. As with Window Walker, just start pressing down arrow after entering the dollar sign, or add some of the text from the setting you want and then press down arrow. In either case, when you reach the item you want, press enter and that settings page will open.
  • =, that’s the equals sign: Calculator for performing calculations. Just enter your calculation and the result will be displayed. If, as I do, you are using a screen reader, the fastest way I have found to read the result is to press down arrow after entering my calculation. Note that you do not need to press enter after you have input your calculation. Also, again if using a screen reader, if you are comfortable with advanced screen reading techniques such as the JAWS Touch Cursor, NVDA Object Navigation or Narrator navigation commands, the result of the calculation and more can be read with these techniques. Last, after your result is displayed, you can press enter on the result and have it put on the Windows Clipboard.
  • !!, that is two presses of the exclamation mark key: History, quickly browse through your history with PowerToys Run with presses of down arrow.

Some Notes

PowerToys Run documentation indicates you can change the default shortcut for launching from Alt+Space.

According to PowerToys documentation, pressing tab is supposed to move you through search results and any buttons or context menus that exist. I am not finding anything being communicated by multiple screen readers as of now when using Tab. I still need to figure out if this is a case of the key simply not working or items taking focus not being communicated properly.

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Creating a Power BI report Using a Screen Reader

Published May 20, 2022 by Kelly Ford

In my work at Microsoft, I work with a number of product teams on accessibility. One of the rewarding things about this is that I get to learn about a number of technologies and experiences. This is obviously accompanied by working to improve the accessibility and user experiences of these products.

I’ve been working with the Power BI team for close to a year and have learned a great deal about the technology. Creating a Power BI report using a screen reader is one of those things that having a few hints about how things work and such can save a lot of time learning what to do.

I put together this audio demo of the basics of creating a report, adding data to the report, understanding the visual layout of the report and how a few of the basic controls work. A transcript in text or Word is also available.

Microsoft has documentation on creating reports available. Accessibility information for creating reports and consuming them is also available. A help article on creating reports using assistive technology has also been created. You can also find various resources on the Power BI roadmap and other release plans.

If you have accessibility questions or concerns on Power BI, the Microsoft enterprise Disability Answer Desk is there to assist.

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Quick Notes on Using a Virtual Machine Environment With A Screen Reader

Published October 21, 2018 by Kelly Ford

Over the years I’ve used a range of solutions for solving the basic challenge of wanting to experiment with new versions of operating systems, screen readers, applications and more without breaking a working system.  From using dedicated test computers, various hard drive imaging solutions, dual booting (running two operating systems on the same machine) and of course using what are known as virtual machines through the various virtual machine technologies available.

The majority of my experience has been running virtual machine technology on Windows to run other windows machines in a virtual environment.  Information in this post is therefore limited to that combination.  There are viable solutions on other platforms as well.

The goal of this post isn’t to provide a full tutorial on using virtual machines.  It is to share a few notes and things I’ve learned in case they are of assistance to others using similar technology in conjunction with a screen reader as a starting point.

For those unfamiliar with what a virtual machine is, think of it as a way to run a second or third computer on an existing computer through a software program.  There are many benefits to this including as mentioned the ability to try things out without breaking a working environment.

The three virtual environments I’ve used are Hyper-V, built directly into Windows; VM Player and VM Work Station from VMware and VirtualBox from Oracle.

There is no one perfect virtual machine solution and in my experience each of the three options I’ve explored has strengths and weaknesses.

I have had success using all three of the solutions I’ve mentioned.  Each requires you understand what’s necessary to get the virtual machine configured and how to access the machine of course.  I do routinely use virtual machines in my environment though and they can be a very helpful tool.

Aside from possibly having to enable the feature, Hyper-V being part of Windows can be very handy and the machine management user experience works well in my experience with screen readers.  In general screen reader-friendly tree-view and list-views are used for most controls.  Perhaps the biggest limitation is that Hyper-V does not support audio directly until you are able to establish a remote desktop connection to the machine.  This means that unless you are skilled at fully unattended operating system install and configuration, there’s a strong possibility you will need assistance in creating the initial virtual machines you want to use.

I have used both the consumer-oriented VM Player and the more enterprise-oriented VM work station over the years.  The machine management experience in VM Player works well with screen readers.  Again, most controls are screen reader-friendly tree-view and list-views.  However, VM Player is limited in some key areas such as the ability to run multiple virtual machines at once or take what are commonly known as snapshots of a virtual machine.  Think of a snapshot as a way to capture your virtual machine at a point in time so if something goes wrong or you want to get back to that point, it is as easy as applying that snapshot.

VM Work Station is a full-featured VM solution.  However in my experience the machine management part of the program did not work as well with screen readers.  Additionally, in my environment I have found more keyboard quirks when switching from a virtual machine back to the main operating system.  These are not insurmountable problems and at one point I used VM Work Station with success for several years.  In general VM Player is free for individual use while Work Station requires you purchase the software.

Both VM Player and VM Work Station have native support for audio.  This means that with the ability starting in Windows 10 to use Microsoft’s Narrator during operating system install, in most cases it is possible to create a virtual machine completely independently.

Whether you use VM Player or Work Station, two important keyboard commands to know are CTRL+g to put keyboard focus into a virtual machine and CTRL+Alt to put keyboard focus back to your host or main machine operating system.  In my experience, it has been helpful to press the Control key a couple times alone after using the CTRL+Alt combination to avoid modifier keys seemingly locked when switching back to your host machine.

Oracle’s Virtual Box has been an interesting experience. .  The machine management and settings areas of the program are very mixed when used with screen readers.  Some items work quite well, such as menus for working with individual machines, while others, such as the experience to modify hotkeys in the program and other machine settings, work poorly at best.  Additionally, I’ve found keyboard access when using up and down arrows in a list of virtual machines sometimes jumps out of this list.  I’ve taken to ensuring I give each virtual machine a name starting with a unique letter because I know once I am in the list of machines, I can press that letter and ensure I move focus to a specific machine.

As with the VMware products, VirtualBox has support for audio natively.  This means that again, fully independent creation and configuration of a virtual machine running Windows 10 is possible.

By default VirtualBox uses the right, and only the right, Control key as what it calls the Host key.  Use that key to toggle keyboard access between the virtual machine and your main computer.  Use CTRL+Home to access a menu of options related to the running virtual machine and use CTRL+t to take a snapshot of the virtual machine.

VirtualBox also has extensive command line support.  Chapter 8 of the user manual has all the details and I find myself largely using this option to work with my virtual machines when using VirtualBox.

VirtualBox has a licensing model that supports both personal use for free and business/enterprise use at a cost.  Oracle’s licensing pages have more information.

As mentioned earlier, details here are largely based on a Windows environment.  Similar solutions exist on other computing environments, often from the same companies mentioned here.  Even on Windows, you are not limited to running just a Windows virtual machine.  In fact that is one of the benefits of using virtualization technology.

Virtual machines can be a handy enhancement to a computing environment.  There is a bit of learning, especially for the first machine you create and use.  Once you’ve crossed that knowledge bridge, creating multiple machines becomes largely as easy as repeating what has been successful in the past.

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