NVDA and gmail part two - the user interface

After you successful registered in gmail, you are now possible to look at the interface from your new mail provider. Please click on the link "postbox" to go to your received mails.

On the next page, you'll find lots of useful links.

At the top, you have listed all google services (news, mail, groups, Youtube etc.). In the middle, there are features like write an e-mail, edit your labels, your folders (postbox, bin, spam, sended mails).

To all these points you can easy and quick navigate in the link list. To show you all links on the website, press NVDA+F7. For example if you want to go to your postbox, please press the letter "p" in the link list until the screen reader says "postbox."

I hope, these instructions aren't wrong. Here in Germany, I can only use gmail in German language so I can only describe the leyout how it looks in German, but I think it should be the same too in english. May be the names of the links are different, but if you look at the website, I'm sure you will manage it! An now, have fun with gmail!

NVDA and gmail - part one the registration and advantages against other mail providers

I have chosen gmail for the describtion how to create an mailaccount because in my opinion it is the best website with the greatest user interface for screen readers. Another advantage against other providers (web, freenet) is, that you can use lots of more features from google:

google news (you can read the newest news from all over the world!), Groups (you can create a group for a specific topic. This is like a mailing list), blog (you can write a webblog like I'm doing).

All this, you can do with one account! But the most important thing is, the mail area is great to use with NVDA!!! to create an google account go to www.google.com/mail and click on the link "register." please fill out the form on the next site. The captcha you have to solve is now no problem for NVDA! if you need captchas more than this time, you can install "webvisum." this is a great firefox add-on to solve captchas. For more information please read the areas "nice add-ons to surf easier with NVDA on the internet" and "instructions how you can install Webvisum" in my blog.

Before I had my mail adress by google, I had it by freenet. The website wasn't accessible for a screen reader and it was to much stuff on it. Until you can write an e-mail, it takes very long. All these problems disapiere with gmail! how easy you can navigate though the mail area, you will read in my next blog!

additional add-ons for NVDA

There are different add-ons for NVDA. These add-ons are not added in the screen reader automatically, you can download and install them if you want. To install an add-on, download the file, select Manage add-ons under Tools in the NVDA menu, press the Install button and browse to the add-on file you downloaded.

One add-on, it's called "OCR", (optical character recognition) extract text from an object which is inaccessible. The Tesseract OCR engine is used. You can download the add-on from http://files.nvaccess.org/nvda-addons/ocr_0.20120529.01.nvda-addon

Another add-on is "Braillenote Classic Braille Display Driver." This driver is for the Braillenote classic notetaker. It only supports the classic braillenotes, mPower or Apex were not tested. Interested? download it from http://dev.unreliabledevice.net/files/nvda/addons/braillenoteDriver-0.2.nvda-addon

A list with these add-ons and a describtion from NV access can you find at www.nvda-project.org/wiki/AddOns

Be carefull with add-ons aren't developed from NV access. This add-ons may be can crash down your NVDA version. More add-ons you can find at http://stormdragon.us/nvda/