The basic postulate posed on each Braille display or Speech Output user is to be able to use a keyboard blindly. For a typewriter user who just starts learning to work with the computer, we describe here the layout of the Microsoft Extended Keyboard. We recommend the use of this keyboard because of two very useful additional keys it includes.
We can impossibly deal with the whole plenty of different notebook keyboards. If you have to use one, you will need the initial help of a sighted person.
See the foil A15 to get a spatial idea of it.
You can also use the Keyboard Help function ***Keyboard_Help of ***SR to look up and to exercise working with keyboard.
In this section we introduce the keyboard labels which we use throughout the whole Tutorial.
The Microsoft Extended Keyboard consists of four units with some additional space between them.
The greatest unit is the Basic Keyboard Block on the left side. It contains all letter keys, number keys, function keys and some special keys.
In the middle of the board you find two blocks. Four keys at the bottom build the Cursor Cross or Arrow Keys Block. Above them you find the Function Block with 9 keys.
On the right side of the board there is a block of keys dedicated to numerical operations called Number Pad. Many Screen Readers use the Number Pad for their own functions such as navigation and mouse emulation.
In the rest of this section we name all keys in these four blocks.
The key labels are ordered in top-down rows, and each row names the labels in left-to-right order. All labels are enclosed in brackets [...].
Some keys have the height of two rows and appear therefore twice. The other keys are disproportionately wide, and we mark them with spaces around their labels within the brackets, e.g. [ Shift ].
The additional empty space between some keys is noted with a bracketed space: [ ].
With many keys you can input additional characters by holding down simultaneously the SHIFT or AltGr key. We bring all input characters of a key separated by commas in the order: pressed alone, pressed together with SHIFT, pressed together with AltGr.
Note: In the rest of the document we don't use brackets to enclose keyboard commands.
Warning: When the Num Lock is switched off (normal state) the Screen Reader users can not use the standard terminal assignment of the NUM PAD shown here. The Screen Reader Software assigns to the NUM PAD its own functions.