The third edition of The Windows Screen Reader Primer: All the Basics and More is now out. We are making it available to you for free in Word and ePub formats. It is authored by David Kingsbury, an Assistive Technology Instructor at the Carroll Center for the Blind. 

The book is meant to help beginning and intermediate JAWS, NVDA, and Windows Narrator users work more effectively with the most important PC applications—like Microsoft Office, email clients, and web browsers. These applications include the Windows operating system, the four primary Office Suite applications (Word, Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint), and the three most commonly used web browsers (Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox). Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive for Desktop, the three most popular cloud-based file-sharing programs, are also covered. So too is Adobe Acrobat Reader for accessing PDF files. And participating in, scheduling, and hosting Zoom meetings.

Appendices include a list of keystrokes, A glossary with over 100 definitions of computer-related terms, academic style guide requirements for formatting Word documents, and a set of practice exercises.

New topics since the second edition include a chapter on using the most popular Google Workspace applications, an introduction to artificial intelligence (AI),and audio and video editing.

If you appreciate this free resource, we hope you will support our organization by choosing to make a gift today. Your support allows us to continue providing free training resources for people with vision loss.

If you missed the virtual book launch that featured a discussion on what’s new in this edition and a live Q&A with the author, you can access the recording at the link below.