Google Search - Searching Techniques

Handy Techniques with Google Search

One of the most common online tasks people undertake every day, that can also be one of the most frustrating, is using a search engine such as Google Search to locate particular data; be that a specific website, details on a particular company, the bio of your favourite musician or actor, reviews of a film or book and so on. Point is, if you have an information need, that information probably sits out there in E memory somewhere, just waiting for you to pull it into focus for a short while if you key in the right search words.

The problem rests in getting at least fairly close to the data you are looking for. I think we have all had that sinking feeling of running a search and reading the fateful words where your search has returned hundreds of thousands of hits. So, in this post, I'm going to visit and refresh on some of the basic approaches to running successful searches in Google Search specifically (although these techniques are pretty universal so worth trying across different search engines). Of course, I realise that other engine flavours are out there - Bing I'm looking at you here - but, for the time being at least, I'm going to stick with Google Search.

Common Techniques in Google Search

Let's get started with the important job of making our searches more leaner and efficient:

1. To search for an exact match to a string of text, enclose your words within double quotations. Doing this forces Google Search to return matches on the entire string of text not just words that appear within the string.

   Example: I want to search for information on the film The Empire Strikes Back. Typing this in to Google Search without the double quotes nets me around 22,500,000 results. But, when I type in "the empire strikes back" the results are reduced considerably to approximately 727,000. This is because the search engine is forced to match the whole string, whereas without the quotes it will return results for combinations of the same words - though not necessarily the whole string.

2. To include and exclude certain words in your search, use the plus and minus symbols. Adding a plus symbol directly before a word informs the search engine to include results with that specific word. Adding a minus informs the search engine to ignore those results that contain that specific word.

   Example: As before, I can write "The Empire Strikes Back" into Google Search but this time around I can add +Boba - because I'm interested only in information specific to that character. When I run this I have a results list that is less than a hundred and from there I can narrow it further by adding -youtube, to exclude the information relating to You Tube. When I complete the latter, the search results narrow down to less than ten. From around 727,000 to under 10, that's not bad going...

3. If you don't know certain words you can include an asterisk to act as a wildcard.

   Example: While I recall that there was a film called the empire strikes ... something... I don't remember the full title. So, in Google Search input field I type in: "the empire strikes *" and run the search. Predictably, "Empire Strikes Back" results are well to the fore - though if you are interested in some of the alternatives, run the search including -back (minus back) and check the results. Fascinating - well, kind of!

4. If you have several words connected with your search and want to list the pages that mention any of them (as opposed to pages that only contain them all) you can use the capitalised word OR. This is useful when you want your results to list out web resources that contain at least one of the words perhaps from a list of several.

   Example: Yes, you guessed it - The Empire Strikes Back again, my search now though is "The Empire Strikes Back" R2D2 OR R2-D2. Running this search forces the return of results for The Empire Strikes Back with mentions specifically of R2, covering both spellings with, and without, the hyphen.

And there we are - a few extra methods to bear in mind when you are next visiting Google Search. Remember also to keep your search words concise and descriptive and don't be too worried about starting vague and then continuing to narrow down your results. Bear in mind that while some of the targeting techniques we have covered here are great for drilling down to more specifics, there are times when drilling down too far means you miss the information you are really looking for. As ever, the more you use these techniques the more you will get an instinctive feel for how best to approach your search engine work.

Have fun!

Placemarkers - Jaws V15 - Word 2007

Using a JAWS Placemarker in MS Word 2007

Most JAWS users are aware of placemarkers, the ability to bookmark elements in a web page where you can easily create your own page mapping strategies to deal with websites old and new.

However, what is less well known is that this placemarker functionality also extends into common Office programs such as Word and Excel. In this post I want to focus in on using a placemarker in MS Word specifically and walk through how neat this feature can be, not only to relocate to a known area in the document, but to assist in making selecting text a lot less hassle.

Before I do that, first a few words in general about JAWS placemarkers. There are two types, temporary and permanent, with placemarkers of the permanent type being stored across JAWS personal settings files so they can be accessed time and time again. A temporary placemarker on the other hand is just that, suitable to be used for the current session, but one that isn't going to survive a reboot. (Note that the placemarker you are about to create here in MS Word is of the permanent variety.)

If you haven't played with placemarkers much you can think of them as a kind of JAWS highlighting pen - a quick way of noting areas of interest in certain types of file and giving you an easy route back to those marked areas. Placemarkers are effectively bookmarks although don't get them mixed up with the formal bookmarks you can create in programs such as MS Word and Internet Explorer.

What might you use a placemarker for? In MS Word, you can pop a placemarker in some text that you simply want to return to and read later. In Excel, you can stick a placemarker on a cell that you similarly need to return to, perhaps after working elsewhere on some formulae that may have some effect on the value in that specific cell. In a web page, which is the more commonly known area, you can stick some placemarkers on a page to help you create your own "mapping" system, pointing to the elements in the page you want to use or access quickly.

Right, that's enough of an introduction, let's focus in on MS Word and see what the wonderful world of placemarkers offers us there.

Setting and Moving to JAWS Placemarkers in MS Word 2007

In MS Word you can assign a placemarker to anything in the document providing that JAWS understands it in the first place. Bear in mind that while this is a permanent placemarker you are only able to assign one per document - a situation unlike using placemarkers online, where you can have several placemarkers for the same page. But this isn't as much of a drawback as you might think because, if you need to relocate the placemarker position in MS Word, you simply move it to where it needs to be. Okay, let's try it out:

1. Open an existing document in MS Word. (Note that if you are creating a new test document you will need to save it before the placemarker feature can be used and stored.)
2. Navigate to a line of text or some other object in the document such as a list or a table.
3. Press CONTROL, WINDOWS KEY and letter K. If you have pressed the keys correctly, JAWS will announce "marking place."
4. Now, to move to the placemarker, press CONTROL HOME or CONTROL END to move focus to the very beginning or very end of the current document. Alternatively, move the cursor away from the placemarker using the ARROW keys.
5. Press ALT, WINDOWS KEY and letter K to now move the cursor to the placemarker you have just set.
6. To move or recycle the placemarker itself, refocus on the new area or item in the document you need to focus on and press CONTROL, WINDOWS KEY and letter K again.

Note: If you mark a place that has already been marked, JAWS will indicate this by saying "place already marked."

Now here is another nifty little trick you can try out. Did you know that you can set a placemarker in the Word document and then use that as a kind of anchor to select text to or from that mark? Let's try it out:

Using a Word Placemarker as a Copy and Paste Mark

1. Make sure your placemarker is focused somewhere appropriate, perhaps next to a word in a paragraph for example.
2. Now move elsewhere in the document as you did in the previous steps. If you move to a location before the placemarker then be aware that you will be copying to your placemarker. If you move to a location after the placemarker then you will be copying from the bookmarked location.
3. Press INSERT SPACEBAR (you will hear a clicking sound) then press letter M. Note that this is a JAWS layered keystroke so you press INSERT SPACEBAR first then let go of these keys before tapping letter M.
4. If you have used the layered keystroke correctly, JAWS will echo that it has "selected between marked place and current position."
5. Now you can choose to copy and/or cut the highlighted text. Alternatively, you can repeat the selection using INSERT SHIFT DOWN ARROW and, if you use this keystroke twice quickly, JAWS will spell the selection.

Practice this operation a few times until it becomes more instinctive. It might save you the hassle of using the dreaded SHIFT key in all your future edit operations!

Placemarkers are really handy and I'll be revisiting some of their other uses in a future post. Have fun!

Notepad - Keyboard - Text Editor

Creating a Log File in Notepad

Here's a nifty little trick that you can perform in Notepad, the ultra basic text editor that ships with the Windows operating system:

1. Tap the WINDOWS key to open the Windows Start Menu. Alternatively, you can use the keystroke of WINDOWS key R to launch the Run dialog box.
2. Type Notepad into the live search field, ensure that it is selected and press the ENTER key to launch the program. If you are using the Run dialog box method, type in Notepad and press ENTER.
3. With focus in the main Notepad text editor window, type .LOG on the first line. (Must be typed in exactly: dot, capital L, capital O, capital G)
4. Press ALT to move to the Menu Bar - ah, remember those? - and open the File menu.
5. ARROW DOWN to the Save As... option and activate this with the ENTER key.
6. Give your LOG file a name and save it to an appropriate location.
7. Close Notepad and navigate to the text file you have just created.
8. Open the text file and you should notice that a date and time stamp has been automatically inserted for you. It will be in the following format: HH:MM DD/MM/YYYY (for example: 09:46 16/03/2015)
9. Every time you open the file, another time and date stamp is automatically added. So, if you need keep an accurate, simple time log for any reason this is one way to do it!

Find and Replace Styles - Duxbury Braille Translator V11.2

Find and Replace a Code or Style in Duxbury Braille Translation Software

As you might expect for a text editing and markup program like Duxbury, you can utilise a Find and Replace feature to replace text just as you would in MS Word. However, what is less well known, is that you can use the same Find and Replace dialog box to find and replace Duxbury styles and codes. Let's try it:

Finding and Replacing Duxbury Styles and Codes

1. Open an existing document in the DBT and launch your code view with ALT F3.
2. Call up the Find and Replace dialog box with the F6 key.
3. With the cursor in the Text to find: edit field, use the Style manual input hotkey of CONTROL F9 or, if you are looking for a Code, use F9 on its own.
4. When you use either CONTROL F9 or F9 the appropriate style of brackets is automatically inserted; angle brackets for Styles and square brackets for Codes. All you do now is type in the relevant Style or Code syntax, such as h1. or /acronym or g1 and so on.


NOTE: Remember to run your Find and Replace operation for your Style start and end tags. It is easy to get caught out and find and replace the Style start tags yet forget to change the end tags too. The end tag is the same as the start tag except for a forward slash / placed at the beginning of the tag text.

5. When you have completed the Text to find: information, press TAB to move to the Replace with: edit field. Using the same F9 or CONTROL F9 method as before, specify the Style or Code you need as a replacement for the Style or Code in the Text to find field.
6. Press TAB to move on through a series of checkboxes (toggle them on and off with the SPACEBAR if required) to eventually focus on the OK button. Press the SPACEBAR again to confirm and run the Find and Replace operation.
7. If the details have all been input correctly, a message box will pop up with the first instance of the text to find selected. You can TAB through the four buttons and activate them as necessary with the SPACEBAR. These Replace? message box buttons are:
• Yes (ALT Y) - Choose this to replace the currently selected instance of the Style or Code only.
• No (ALT N) - Choose this to ignore the currently selected instance of the Style or Code only.
• All (ALT A) - Choose this to replace all instances of the selected Style or Code.
• Stop (ALT S) - Choose this to stop the Find and Replace immediately.
8. Continue to work through the instances of the Style or Code you need to change. When there are no more found, Duxbury will indicate the end of the operation with a small summary window showing how many changes were made.

And that's it! Much easier than laboriously changing every Style or Code manually isn't it?

Fractions - MS Word - Accessible Information - JAWS - NVDA

Fractions and Speech

It may never crop up of course, that document you are creating - or all the documents you might ever create for that matter - may never include even one solitary fraction. If that's the case, you'll probably want to skip over this post.

But imagine it does contain fractions? Then imagine that one of the people who needs to read that document uses a screenreader such as JAWS or NVDA... Hmmm, feeling the shivers a bit now I'll bet - how can something so seemingly insignificant create such a potential fuss? The great cry goes up, how am I going to write the fractions so that JAWS will read them? And... how does JAWS read them anyway!?" So, in this post, I'm going to spend a bit of time talking about fractions...

The first thing to understand is that there are several ways of actually inputting fractions into MS Word. For example, you can:

• Type in a fraction like this - 1/2 or 1/4
• Create and display a fraction inside a Word field - I'll explain this in a bit.
• Or you can insert a common fraction using the specific ASCII code - I'll explain that shortly too.

What you as a document creator need to be aware of though is that not all screenreaders will read across all of these methods equally. So, let's investigate each of the above and see what happens.

The All Manual Way For Fractions

It may come as no surprise that the most obvious way of inputting a fraction, just typing in the numerator followed by a slash and then the denominator with no spaces is likely to prove the most accessible across a diverse range of assistive tech. With an example fraction like "1/5", JAWS will simply repeat the characters and say "one slash 5". (Of course the listener will have to build the contextual meaning around this, something that should be fairly straightforward so long as the surrounding text is useful.)

However, what might not be so apparent is something that can happen when you type in the more common fractions, such as one half, one quarter or three quarters. Try out the following:

1. Launch MS Word and create a new document if you don't have one open already.
2. Type in: 1/2 and press ENTER to insert another paragraph.
3. Now move back up and check the fraction you have just input. Is JAWS announcing "1 slash 2" or is it saying "one half"?
4. On a different line, type in "3/12" - once again check to hear how JAWS announces what you have typed in. JAWS should indicate "3 slash twelve".

So, why the change in echo with the half? Well, it's because the text on screen is actually different - MS Word has automatically changed it without you even realising it. This is all due to a checkbox in the Autoformat As You Type tab, labelled "(Replace as you type) fractions (1/2) with the fraction character." The bottom line is that Word automatically replaces three individual characters with one character, representing the common fraction. This explains the different echo with JAWS.

If you want to change this behaviour in MS Word so that there is no automatic formatting then try the following:

Toggle Fraction Autoformatting As You Type On and Off (Office 2007)

1. In MS Word, press ALT F to open the main menu via the Office button.
2. Press the letter I to activate the Word Options button directly. Alternatively, use the TAB key to put focus on the button and press SPACEBAR to activate it.
3. In the Word Options dialog box, press the DOWN ARROW until you have focus on the list option called Proofing.
4. With focus on Proofing press the TAB key to move to the Autocorrect Options button and tap SPACEBAR to activate it. Alternatively, when you put focus on Proofing, you can use ALT A to activate the button directly.
5. The Word Options multi-page dialog box opens up. Use CONTROL TAB to move between the pages to focus on the correct one which is labelled: Autoformat As You Type.
6. With focus on the correct page, press the TAB key to locate the (Replace as you type) Fractions with Fraction Character checkbox. Use the SPACEBAR to toggle the status of the checkbox in the usual way.
7. When you have set the checkbox status as required, press the ENTER key to confirm the changes and close the dialog box. (You might want to explore the other options here though, in which case just TAB through to the OK button and press SPACEBAR when you're done.)
8. Focus will return to the previous dialog box, once again TAB through and press SPACEBAR to confirm.

After you have toggled the Autoformat option off, when you type "1/2" in the Word document, it will stay as three individual characters exactly as you typed.

Fractions and EQ Fields

Sounds impressive doesn't it? And in a sense it kind of is, but using fields in documents has something of a difficult history for screenreader users especially and it should come as no surprise that this method will result in something pretty inaccessible to software like NVDA and JAWS without some serious hand-holding. However, don't discount this method entirely - especially if you need a paper copy of the work containing the fractions. From a visual perspective at least, the fractions produced using this method are large and clear and could be suitable for a low vision user. That said, from an electronic document perspective, bear in mind that the bottom line is this: using these EQ fields will result in an output that is not automatically echoed with a screenreader. Although it is technically possible to still work with the fields as we will discover. Anyway, let's explore!

Create a Fraction Using an EQ Field

1. In a new blank document in MS Word, press the keystroke of CONTROL F9 to insert a blank field area. Bear in mind that if you are using a screenreader there will be no echo when you do this. The main thing is: do not press the arrow keys to move the cursor or you will lose your positioning inside the field you've just created!
2. Type in the text for the fraction you require, it must be in the following format: EQ \F(X,Y) - where X,Y is the numerator and the denominator. For example, writing the fraction 3/36 the text would be EQ \F(3,36). To confirm, the equation text is E Q space backslash F Open Bracket First Number Comma Second Number Close Bracket.
3. When you have typed this code, use SHIFT F9 to toggle the code view - doing this switches between the equation you have just input and the result of that equation - providing there are no errors of course!

NOTE: The equation text view in the field codes can be read with JAWS and NVDA, however the output or result of the equation cannot - or, more accurately, may only be partially read. So, when working with speech, use the code view at all times. A useful hotkey to remember here is ALT F9 as this hotkey will toggle between the two different field views for all the fields in the current document at the same time. Very useful that one!

By default, the output of this equation field method creates a fraction consisting of the numbers you have specified. The actual display of the fraction is quite large and physically spans two lines. In that sense, low vision computer users may find the display of these fractions quite friendly and useful. Anyone using speech on the other hand, will be unable to read the fraction output on screen and will instead have to toggle the field codes back on using SHIFT F9 or ALT F9.

Inputting a Fraction Character using the ASCII Code

Okay, you thought that using a blank field and manually entering an equation code was fun? Well, think again. The real hardcore here is all about memorising a bunch of ASCII codes for specific fraction characters. Yes indeed, you can input the ASCII code for a common fraction directly into a Word document. Let's go through this now using an example where I am inserting the ASCII fraction character for one half:

Insert a Common Fraction Character Using the ASCII Code

1. Open MS Word and ensure you are in a new blank document.
2. Tap the NUMBER LOCK key on your keyboard, this is normally located at the top left of the numberpad section on a typical PC keyboard. (Note that if you are using a laptop you will need to locate your Function key - normally labelled "Fn" - to access your numberpad).
3. With number lock active, hold the ALT key down and type 0189 using the numberpad keys.
4. Tap the NUMBER LOCK key to turn the mode off and check what has been input into the Word document. You should find a fraction character for one half - JAWS will announce this as "one half" while NVDA announces "a half".

Okay, let's have a bit more of this ASCII action. Here is a small table with some of the more common codes - I've also included a couple of columns to give you an idea of how well recent versions of JAWS and NVDA cope in reading the characters.

Fraction	ASCII Code	JAWS V15 Announces	NVDA 2015.1 Announces
One Quarter	ALT 0188	One fourth	A quarter
One Half	ALT 0189	One half	A half
Three Quarters	ALT 0190	Three fourths	Three quarter
One Third	ALT 8531	No echo	One third
Two Thirds	ALT 8532	No echo	Two thirds
One Fifth	ALT 8533	No echo	No echo
Two Fifths	ALT 8534	No echo	No echo
Three Fifths	ALT 8535	No echo	No echo
Four Fifths	ALT 8536	No echo	No echo
One Sixth	ALT 8537	No echo	No echo
Five Sixths	ALT 8538	No echo	No echo
One Eighth	ALT 8539	No echo	No echo
Three Eighths	ALT 8540	No echo	No echo
Five Eighths	ALT 8541	No echo	No echo
Seven Eighths	ALT 8542	No echo	No echo

Clearly you can tell that some of these fraction characters are not going to be good choices as screenreader users will struggle to know that anything is even there in some cases. I should also point out that some of these characters are very narrow so may not magnify well and, at the very least, may need to have a bigger font size for some readers.

Summary

So where does this leave us? Pretty well back at the beginning really! I mentioned earlier that inputting the fraction as individual characters is the safest option for both mag and speech. Of course, there is nothing to really stop you using a blank field or using some of the ASCII codes but you must bear in mind that those methods may result in some difficulties and require more support and context-building with the AT user. As with all other things regarding document accessibility, whatever you decide to do, keep it consistent. Sometimes less is more.

Have fun!