Hi everyone. I have been trying to find a way to have JAWS continue reading a document in the background while I take notes on it in a different window. I’ve Googled and asked the FS companion, but it keeps giving me different answers, and none of the ways it said I could do it worked. Does anyone know if there is a way to do this?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
By Samanthia, 4 August, 2025
Forum
Windows
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A possibility
First a question—does JAWS have a setting that allows to ignore key presses during speech, including pressing Enter?
If so, you could start JAWS reading a document from top to bottom, or whatever portion you need read aloud, then alt tab over to Notepad or whatever you prefer to jot down notes in, and take your notes while JAWS continues reading until you manually stop it, likely with Control key.
Optionally, you may want to disable the speaking of typed characters and words, so as not to interupt your typing or have the speech overlapping.
Hope this makes sense.
Admittedly I use NVDA, and we can do this so I am hopeful that JAWS can as well. 😅
Re: A possibility
You can do this with NVDA? How? I would think it has the same focus changing and interrupting as other screen readers?
JAWS Select Braille View
The closest I can come up with for JAWS is to use Select Braille View which allows you to divide the display into two regions where one can be in another window or buffer. If you have a Braille display you could try it? I don't know of a way to do this with speech only because switching windows will change focus and interrupt what was happening. The only real option would be to record the audio so you can play it back with a media player.
@Travis Roth
If you go into NVDA settings, down to keyboard. In here are settings for allowing NVDA to announce characters and/or words. As well. There are also 2 more checkboxes; Allowing Speech Interupt for typed characters, and Speech interupt for pressing Enter.
As for notetaking, there are a few note-taking addons; one in particular is Quick Notetaker.
It is outdated, but you can still make it work. Anyways, its been a while since I've used it, but there you go.
HTH.