This page contains a text transcript of the majority of the presentation given to the American Council of the Blind’s Convention on Saturday 28 June 2025, entitled Efficient Messaging Using WhatsApp and JAWS.
You can download the audio from this presentation here.
Brian Hartgen: Thank you very much and a very good Saturday morning to everybody. It’s wonderful to be presenting to you once again as part of the ACB Convention and BITS specifically. I very much hope that you’re going to enjoy what I’m going to present for you today. I’m Brian Hartgen and, for the next 50 minutes, I’m going to be talking to you about an application that I resisted using for years. I don’t know why that was, but I thought perhaps it was just another app that I needed to learn how to use and which I could well do without. How wrong can you be? But one of our product beta testers insisted that it was being widely used in his country and that I really ought to try it. That application is called WhatsApp. WhatsApp is one of the world’s most popular free multi-platform messaging applications. It allows you to send text messages, make voice and video calls, share files and images, post status updates, and more all using either Wi-Fi or mobile data.
This means that you can stay connected even if you don’t have a mobile calling plan or want to avoid expensive call charges. What makes WhatsApp especially appealing is its cross-platform compatibility. It works seamlessly on both smartphones and computers, including Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android. That means that you can start a conversation on your phone, then continue it later on your desktop or laptop, for example. A feature that’s particularly useful for those of us who you screen readers and to prefer a full keyboard for typing. Another benefit is that WhatsApp doesn’t require a username or login, it simply uses your phone number. The app can automatically detect which of your contacts are already using WhatsApp, so you rarely have to manually add people. Even if your phone is turned off or offline temporarily, WhatsApp stores messages securely on its servers and delivers them the next time you open the app.
This ensures that you won’t miss important messages and you won’t be constantly checking your device out of fear of missing something. As of 2025, WhatsApp has over 2.7 billion active users globally. I can’t even imagine what that’s like, making it the most widely-used messaging app in the world. It dominates markets particularly in Europe, South America, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, often replacing traditional SMS or phone calling entirely. You might remember the days of MSN Instant Messenger, does that bring back a memory for you? How good that was in terms of being able to send and receive instant messages? Also, how accessible it was. My wife and I got to know each other by using MSN. That was the way that we were communicating with each other. WhatsApp is very much like that, it is one of the best communication apps that we have available today.
Those of you who have attended any of my training courses or who have heard my previous presentations will know that I don’t just like using apps in their native form. I like to be very efficient at using them, I like to create scripts for JAWS for Windows, so that I can get around them faster. That is the case with WhatsApp. This particularly helps when I present, for example, my shows for our internet radio station. We have a WhatsApp group pertaining to the station and I need to keep very much on top of the messages which come in, so that I can handle them very quickly and read out the messages on air. The app needs to be littered with shortcut keys and efficient ways of working, so I created the JAWS WhatsApp scripts. You will now find some basic WhatsApp scripts within JAWS by default, but I did create them first, and if I can say so, the scripts from our company provide a far greater range of features and shortcut keys than those in JAWS out of the box.
What I want to do here is to give you an introduction to WhatsApp and how efficiently it can be navigated, and maybe by the end of the presentation, you’ll give it a try if you haven’t used it already. In order to use WhatsApp on your Windows computer, there are a few things that you need. First of all, a cell phone containing the app for WhatsApp, which you can download from the appropriate store providing apps for your individual phone. Optionally, the JAWS scripts for your computer, which I will talk about later, and finally, the app for Windows itself. There are two apps you could potentially download and instal from the Microsoft store, WhatsApp and WhatsApp Beta. As you might imagine, WhatsApp Beta contains the latest innovations, so if you want to live on the cutting edge, you can use that. I would demonstrate how to download and instal WhatsApp from the Microsoft store, but I don’t think I’ve got time to do that and I want to get to the good stuff.
I’m going to assume that you’ve been to the Microsoft store, you’ve pressed Control F in order to find an app, you type “WhatsApp” or “WhatsApp Beta,” and then you press enter and you should be able to find it right there. It’s a very simple process. To tab to the app itself, press enter on it and then you’re going to tab to the “Instal” button. This is, of course, assuming that you are signed into a Microsoft account. You’ll then get a Windows notification within a minute or so to detail the fact that the app has been installed. When you start WhatsApp or WhatsApp Beta for the very first time, there is a procedure where you need to link WhatsApp from your phone to the computer. However, fortunately, this is a totally accessible process. It didn’t used to be, but it is now.
It involves using your phone number as the linking mechanism, and I’m going to describe how you do it. Here are the steps involved to be used on your phone. Select the “Settings” tab at the bottom of the screen, select “Link devices,” select “Link a device.” Authenticate that you want to do this either by typing your PIN through touch ID or face ID. I’m going to leave the phone there at this point, because we’re going to go to the computer now. I’m going to go to the start menu.
JAWS: Search box edit.
Brian Hartgen: I’m going to type “WhatsApp Beta.” I’ve reinstalled it specifically for this demonstration. I’m going to leave my regular WhatsApp the way it is, so yes, you can run the two apps concurrently.
JAWS: WhatsApp Beta app, press write the view options.
Brian Hartgen: I’m going to press enter now.
JAWS: WhatsApp Beta, get started button.
Brian Hartgen: That’s exactly what we want to do, get started. I’m going to press space on this.
JAWS: Send feedback button
Brian Hartgen: I need to press the tab key at this stage.
JAWS: Link with phone number link.
Brian Hartgen: It says “Link with phone number.” Again, I’m going to press enter or space.
JAWS: Enter phone number, edit.
Brian Hartgen: Now, the first thing that you need to do is to select the country. Now, it is US by default, I seem to remember, but let me press shift tab.
JAWS: Select country/region button collapsed.
Brian Hartgen: The button is collapsed at the moment, I need to press space on that.
JAWS: Pop up search country/region edit.
Brian Hartgen: Here, I can type United Kingdom or almost certainly United States in your case. Then tab.
JAWS: List box, United Kingdom +44, one of one.
Brian Hartgen: It’s only got one result there. United Kingdom, +44. That’s perfect, I’m going to press enter.
JAWS: Selected country, United Kingdom. Click to select a different country button collapsed.
Brian Hartgen: Tab.
JAWS: Enter phone number, edit, +44.
Brian Hartgen: It’s already got +44 in the edit box. You need to be a little bit careful here. You need to press the end key, so that you are at the end of that. Then I’m going to type in my phone number. Now, tab.
JAWS: Next button.
Brian Hartgen: Let me explain what’s going to happen here, because I need to do this fairly quickly, because I’ve only got a limited amount of time to do it. I’m going to press space on this button and then it is going to say “Linking WhatsApp with the particular phone number,” which I’m not going to let you hear all of. Then it’s going to display a code. This code you need to type into your phone. You’re going to tab to where the code is displayed and you’ll want to examine it one character at a time. Because I’ve got the JAWS scripts for WhatsApp installed, I can press Function Key F9 by itself, and this will virtualize that for me, so that I can read it one character at a time, and then I can type it into my phone. Let’s go through this and see if we can get it set up, shall we?
JAWS: Next button.
Brian Hartgen: Here I’m on the next button, press space.
JAWS: Send feedback button.
Brian Hartgen: Tab.
JAWS: Linking WhatsApp account +447972.
Brian Hartgen: Tab.
JAWS: 3HY4YQGM.
Brian Hartgen: There’s my code, F9.
JAWS: 3HY4YQG.
Brian Hartgen: That’s in the virtual viewer now, press home.
JAWS: Three.
Brian Hartgen: That’s the first part, now let’s go back to the phone
iPhone: Verification code. Zero date values entered.
Brian Hartgen: I’m going to read the code and start typing it in.
JAWS: Three.
iPhone: Three
JAWS: H.
iPhone: Cap H.
JAWS: Y.
iPhone: Cap Y.
JAWS: Four.
iPhone: Four.
JAWS: G.
Brian Hartgen: We’re nearly at the end.
iPhone: Cap G.
JAWS: M.
iPhone: Cap M. Mike logging in, ellipsis.
JAWS: Send feedback button, search or start a new chat edit.
Brian Hartgen: I am now logged in. You can tell, because it said…
JAWS: Search or start a new chat edit.
Brian Hartgen: That we are logged in at this point, so I can put my phone away and we can start looking at the app in detail. I do realise that the speech output from the iPhone was very fast there, but including it is almost inconsequential, because it was just to verify that the code had been entered successfully. How do you communicate with people using WhatsApp? The best way is to add them to your regular contacts on your phone. When you add a person’s phone number to your contacts in the normal way, and if they are on WhatsApp, you will immediately see their names when you want to start a conversation with them. I will show you how to do that later on. Alternatively, you can join a WhatsApp group or community. A group is typically a group of people who share a common interest. That can be, for example, a group of family members who want to talk to each other, perhaps to plan a holiday or something similar, or as I say, it can be a group of people who share a hobby or interest they would like to discuss.
You can have up to 1,024 people in a WhatsApp group. A community is a collection of groups under one umbrella. Up to 50 groups can be part of one community, with 5,000 members in total. Our company provides the scripts for WhatsApp and there are two versions of them. You can purchase them to instal into most modern JAWS versions as a standalone product. However, if you have our Leasey product, which contains a vast range of tools, utilities, and services to help JAWS users, the WhatsApp scripts are included already. The WhatsApp screen contains a number of controls through which you can press Tab and Shift Tab. The primary components are a series of buttons such as “Create new conversation,” “Conversation info,” “Video call,” and so on. There are two list boxes which you’re going to interact with. The first of these shows the conversation threads available. JAWS refers to this as the “Chats list.”
The second is a list of messages in that conversation that you have selected. The scripts refer to this as the “Messages list.” There’s also an edit field for typing a message to the person in the focus conversation. Because there are quite a number of such controls to move through, keyboard shortcuts have been provided as part of the scripts to directly move to key areas of the application. Some of these are as follows. To move to the typing edit field from within a conversation is Alt T. To move to the chats list, it’s Alt C. To move to the messages list, it’s Alt M, to record a voice message, which I’ll get to later, that’s Function Key F1. This does not have a mnemonic keystroke, such as Alt R, and the reason for that will become apparent later. Audio or voice call is Alt A, video call is Alt with V. You can obtain a complete list of all of the keyboard shortcuts by checking the scripts help section, which is Insert with H. Let’s just demonstrate some of that.
JAWS: Search or start a new chat edit.
Brian Hartgen: If you’ve got someone in your chat list that you’ve already had a conversation with, that’s the edit field, where you can start typing their name, and I’ll do that in a moment. Let’s tab.
JAWS: Chats list list box. Brian Dalton, “Thanks, Brian,” one of 61.
Brian Hartgen: This is my chats list, and this contains a list of all the people that I’ve contacted on WhatsApp in the past. If I arrow down.
JAWS: Brian 004, two of 61.
Brian Hartgen: We’ll ignore that for the moment, that’s an audio message that I sent to myself. I know, a bit sad, but I wanted to test it worked. Let’s arrow down.
JAWS: “Justine, thank you.” Nine of 61.
Brian Hartgen: I’m trying to find people where I don’t mind you listening to the individual message. What is going to happen here is that when you focus on one of these conversations from people you’ve chatted with in the past, it’s going to read the name of the person followed by the most recent message in that conversation. Let’s press home to move to the top of the list.
JAWS: Brian Dalton. “Thanks, Brian.” One of 61
Brian Hartgen: I’m going to press enter to open up this conversation.
JAWS: Brian Dalton, “Thanks, Brian.” Type to Brian Dalton edit.
Brian Hartgen: It says “Type to Brian Dalton.” That means that I’m in the edit field already, so I can start typing to him immediately. I could press Tab and Shift Tab around this screen if I wanted to. In fact, I’ll do that. I’ll press tab.
JAWS: Record voice message button.
Brian Hartgen: Now, I’m not going to do that at this stage. I’m going to press Alt T.
JAWS: Type to Brian Dalton edit.
Brian Hartgen: That immediately focuses me back on the typing edit field. That’s quite good, because if you get lost, you can use that to get back to a known orientation point. If I press Alt with N for name.
JAWS: Brian Dalton, last seen today at 13:17.
Brian Hartgen: That’s again useful, because you can tell how recently he has been online. Again, I could press the Tab key or Shift and Tab until I get to the list of messages within that conversation, or I can press Alt M.
JAWS: Brian Dalton. “Thanks, Brian.” 19:11.
Brian Hartgen: It plays a little sound there and we get into the individual messages. Interestingly, the most recent message is at the bottom of the list, so if we work our way up, we’ll be going in reverse time order. If I arrow up here.
JAWS: Brian. Thanks, Brian. That all makes sense. Have a wonderful time. 16:48, read 15:08 of 15:09.
Brian Hartgen: We’ve exchanged quite a few messages, and that is my most recent message to him. If I arrow down…
JAWS: Brian Dalton. “Thanks, Brian.” 19:11.
Brian Hartgen: We can tell that he has sent that message. I’m just going to arrow back up to the previous one.
JAWS: Brian. “Thanks, Brian. That all makes sense. Have a wonderful time.” 16:48
Brian Hartgen: It’s a very nice list box. If I want to chat with somebody else, I can press the Escape key at this point.
JAWS: Chat’s list list box. Brian Dalton. “Thanks, Brian.” One of 61.
Brian Hartgen: I don’t need to do that. I could have gone to the chat list if I’d wanted to without pressing Escape, I could have pressed Alt C to do that. If I open this back up again.
JAWS: Type to Brian Dalton edit.
Brian Hartgen: And then I press Alt C.
JAWS: Chats list list box. Brian Dalton. “Thanks, Brian.” One of 61.
Brian Hartgen: Just to recap for a moment, when you are inside a conversation, you can press Alt M to access the list of messages in that conversation directly. You can then use the up and down arrow keys to move through the list to review the activity. You can press Function key F9 on any of them if you want to review that message word by word or character by character. Now, when you press Alt M, the focus will not be at the top or the bottom of the list. The scripts contain special coding, so that you are placed at the point in the list that you last accessed. The default JAWS scripts do not do this. This is actually very useful, because if you have been examining messages in a conversation within that list and then you decide that you want to do some typing, you can then press Alt T to move to the typing edit field. Type what you want to say and press Enter, and I realise we haven’t covered some of this yet, and then you can press Alt M and you’ll immediately be back to where you were.
You can also press Control with 1 through to Control with 9. That will move between the different conversations that you’ve got open. In other words, the first nine conversations as they appear in order within the chat list. I think the first one on my chat list is Brian Dalton, so I could always press Control 1 in order to get to that conversation. Control Tab and Control Shift Tab will also move between the different conversations. I should make mention of the filter edit field as well, activated with Control F. When you are in the main WhatsApp screen, you can press Control F, and when the field is focused you can type the name of a person whose conversation you wish to access. What you are doing here is you are filtering by conversations that you’ve already had ongoing, so this is not creating a new conversation to somebody. What this does is allows you to filter through the conversations that you’ve already got, and as you’ve heard, I’ve got over 60, so it’s actually quite useful to do that rather than arrowing all the way through the chats list. Alt C for the chats list.
JAWS: Brian Dalton. “Thanks, Brian.” One of 61.
Brian Hartgen: I need to arrow down quite a way if I want to find Justine, don’t I? Rather than do that, I’m going to press Control F.
JAWS: Search or start a new chat edit.
Brian Hartgen: Type “Justine,” press Tab.
JAWS: Chat’s list list box. “Justine, thank you.” One of one.
Brian Hartgen: You’ll hear that I’ve only got one result now, which is Justine. I can press enter if I want to chat with her. Let’s now send a text message to somebody. My wife is on WhatsApp, so I can send a message to her. She’s not in my chat list however, so we need to do something about it, but prior to doing that, I would highly recommend that you enable the typing sound indicator. This can be done by pressing Control F12 repeatedly, and it has four options associated with it. “No information is spoken when a message is being composed,” “You will hear a typing sound when a message is being composed,” “You will hear a typing sound when a message is being composed and the name of the person typing.” This is the preferred option, because you’re going to get everything. “You’ll hear the name of the person typing.” Using that setting, no typing sound indicator is given.
Regardless of whichever option you’ve set it to, you can always check if a person is typing by pressing Function key F12. Even if you have nothing spoken automatically, you can still do that by pressing F12 and you’ll find out if anybody is typing or not. Assuming the feature is not disabled when someone is typing a message to you, if you are focused within the WhatsApp application, you’ll hear a report of this, even if the conversation pertaining to it is not focused. In other words, if you’re having a conversation with Mary and you’ve pressed Ctrl Tab to move into another conversation, when she begins to type, you will be notified through the scripts of what is happening. As soon as the message is sent by the other participant in the conversation, the scripts instruct JAWS to announce it automatically if the option is set in the scripts to announce the messages. This can be enabled or disabled by pressing Ctrl Shift F12.
If you don’t want to hear the messages spoken automatically, you can change it with that keystroke. You’ll notice that sometimes the typing indicator sound will stop, but no message is announced. This is because the other person has stopped typing temporarily, but has not sent the messages yet. The typing sound indicator will pick up again when the person resumes typing. The scripts understand that a new message has not been added to the conversation, and so doesn’t cause JAWS to announce anything new. Now, when automatic reading of messages is enabled, JAWS reads the message followed by the time that the message was sent, together with its status, such as “Sent.” Now, this additional information can be disabled as well by pressing Control Shift F11. You’re already beginning to see, I hope, that we really do have a number of different options.
I’m not going to tailor this too much and refine it, because I want you to hear most things. What I’m going to do is, first of all, send a new message to Lulu, and the way that I’m going to do that is by pressing Control N for a new conversation. Remember, if she was in my chats list already, I could find her, but I’ve removed her, so we’ll find her in the regular contacts list. Control N.
JAWS: Search name or number edit.
Brian Hartgen: I’m going to type “Lulu” in here, because I know she’s in my contacts somewhere. I’m going to tab.
JAWS: List box, all contacts. Lulu, one of one.
Brian Hartgen: I’m going to press enter.
JAWS: Type to Lulu edit.
Brian Hartgen: It says “Type to Lulu.” Now, let’s check her status. If I press Alt N.
JAWS: Lulu, last seen today, 07:21,
Brian Hartgen: If I wanted to virtualize that, in other words, put it in the JAWS virtual viewer, I could, by pressing Alt N twice quickly. Now, I’m going to send her a message.
JAWS: Hi, Lulu, how are you today? Edit.
Brian Hartgen: I’m going to press enter.
JAWS: Brian. “Hi, Lulu, how are you today?”
Brian Hartgen: What you heard is a little sound there which indicates that the message has been sent and then you heard the message being read back to you, because that is the most recent message. Now, we have a variety of message reading keystrokes. You can read the most recent 10 messages by pressing Alt 1 through to Alt 0, with the numbers just above the letter keys. Alt 1 will read the most recent message to you. There are keystrokes as well for reading messages 11 to 20. Alt Windows 1 through to Alt Windows 0. If I press alt one now…
JAWS: Brian. “Hi, Lulu. How are you today?” 13:59, received.
Brian Hartgen: That is reading the most recent message. If I were to press Alt 1 twice quickly in this particular case, it will, if it’s a text message, virtualize it, so it will display it in the virtual viewer. I’ll do that now.
JAWS: Brian. “Hi, Lulu, how are you today?” 13:59, received.
Brian Hartgen: I can now review it word by word or character by character. There’s nothing special about that, but if I arrow down.
JAWS: Link context menu for this message.
Brian Hartgen: It says “Link context menu for this message.” What you could have done was to press Alt M in order to move to the messages list for this conversation, you could have found the message in question, which will be at the bottom of the list, you could activate the context menu for it and come down to reply, then press enter, and you could have replied to that individual message, but we don’t need to, because we’ve got this link here. We can stay exactly where we are and we’ll just press enter on it.
JAWS: Context menu, thumbs up sign.
Brian Hartgen: Now I can arrow down.
JAWS: Reply, two of 11, copy three of 11, forward four of 11.
Brian Hartgen: We’ve got all kinds of options in here. That’s a very neat way of being able to do it, and it ensures that you are replying to the message that you intended. I’m just going to press Escape to come out of here.
JAWS: Type to Lulu edit.
Brian Hartgen: I’m back in my typing edit field. Now, what I’m going to do is to move to the computer at the other side of the room, which is Lulu’s desktop computer, and I’m going to start typing. Hopefully, you should hear what’s happening immediately, because we’ve got the typing indicator sound enabled and we should get messages spoken automatically.
JAWS: Lulu is typing. Lulu, “Hi to everyone who is listening to the presentation. I am a big fan of the Bits organisation and ACB as well.”
Brian Hartgen: Perfect. Now we’re going to send another message back to her. “We’re all very glad about that. Shortly, I am going to send you a voice message.” Press enter.
JAWS: Brian, “We’re all very glad about that. Shortly, I am going to send a voice message.”
Brian Hartgen: If I press Alt 1, what have we got?
JAWS: Brian, “We’re all very glad about that. Shortly, I am going to send a voice message.” 14:06.
Brian Hartgen: Alt 2.
JAWS: Lulu, “Hi to everyone who is listening to the presentation, I am a big fan of the Bits organisation and ACB as well.” 14:05.
Brian Hartgen: Alt 3.
JAWS: Brian. “Hi, Lulu, how are you today?” 13:59.
Brian Hartgen: You can see we’re working our way back through the chain. Let Lulu send one more message and then I’ll show you some other things here.
JAWS: Lulu is typing. Lulu, “I can’t wait to hear it.”
Brian Hartgen: If I press Alt 1 now…
JAWS: Lulu, “I can’t wait to hear it.” 14:07.
Brian Hartgen: Now, I’ve just been typing my messages in the regular typing edit field, having no regard at all for what is going on. We’re only exchanging private messages, so it doesn’t matter, but if you were working in a group or community, it might be important for you to manage these messages as individual threads. Let’s just see how we can reply to the existing message. If I press Alt 1.
JAWS: Lulu, “I can’t wait to hear it.”
Brian Hartgen: I’ve pressed alt one twice quickly and now arrow down.
JAWS: Link context menu for this message.
Brian Hartgen: Press enter.
JAWS: Context menu, thumbs up sign.
Brian Hartgen: Down arrow.
JAWS: Reply, two of nine.
Brian Hartgen: I could then press enter.
JAWS: Leaving menus, type to Lulu edit.
Brian Hartgen: We’re now replying to Lulu, and I will say, “I will send it in just a moment.” Press enter
JAWS: Brian replying to Lulu, “I will send it in just a moment.” 14:09.
Brian Hartgen: It said Brian replying to Lulu, so immediately, we know what’s going on there. If I press Alt 1…
JAWS: Brian replying to Lulu, “I will send it in just a moment.”
Brian Hartgen: We even get that on the Alt numbered keystrokes. I’m going to switch to the JAWS default settings, and there’s a particular reason why I want to do this. Insert Space then Z.
JAWS: Default alternate user directory mode.
Brian Hartgen: I’m going to focus on the desktop.
JAWS: Windows D, folder view, list view, WhatsApp.
Brian Hartgen: Now Lulu is going to send another message,
JAWS: New notification from WhatsApp. Lulu, “This is test message one…” Text input one of one.
Brian Hartgen: I’m now going to revert back to my own JAWS settings.
JAWS: Space off.
Brian Hartgen: The WhatsApp scripts are enabled again. I’m still on the desktop.
JAWS: Folder view, list view.
Brian Hartgen: Yes, I am, and she’s going to send a message again.
JAWS: Lulu, “This is test message two.”
Brian Hartgen: Did you hear the difference there? When WhatsApp is not focused, it knows about this, and so when a new message arrives, it will send a Windows notification. For our Leasey product particularly, we have a whole set of notification rules for JAWS, which abbreviate information from all kinds of applications. WhatsApp is definitely one of those, as you’ve just heard. Also, Microsoft Outlook, Teams, and a variety of others. You are only hearing the information that you really want, particularly if you are part of a WhatsApp group and the person sending a message is not in your contacts, you may well hear the full name of that person together with their phone number. Now, obviously, that’s not a particularly good thing if you are processing a lot of messages. What you can do is set a nickname for that individual person.
I’m not going to let you hear somebody’s phone number, but what I can do is practise with this conversation that we’ve got open right now. We are chatting with Lulu, but we are going to give her a nickname. What we’re going to do is actually call her “Louise” instead. Having opened up the conversation with Lulu, which we have, because we’ve been using it, I’m going to focus on the list of messages in that conversation. If you remember from earlier, that is Alt M.
JAWS: Lulu, “I can’t wait to hear it.” 14:07.
Brian Hartgen: Now, I’m going to press Alt Windows N for nickname.
JAWS: Review WhatsApp name dialogue, check the WhatsApp name in the edit field to ensure it is correct. Then press enter. Lulu.
Brian Hartgen: It says “Lulu” in there. If it wasn’t correct, it’s an edit field, so you can change it. I’m going to press enter.
JAWS: Store nickname dialogue, type the new name and press enter.
Brian Hartgen: I’m going to type Louise in here and then press enter.
JAWS: Louise has been added.
Brian Hartgen: Okay, Louise has been added. Now if I press Alt 1…
JAWS: Louise, “This is test message two,” 14:12.
Brian Hartgen: And Alt 2.
JAWS: “This is test message one.” 14:11.
Brian Hartgen: I should be still in the list of messages if I want to review it this way, so if I arrow up and down.
JAWS: Brian, “We’re all very glad about that. Shortly, I am going to send a voice message.” 14:06.
Brian Hartgen: That was one of the messages that we sent, and if I down arrow.
JAWS: Louise, “I can’t wait to hear it.” 14:07.
Brian Hartgen: We are of course using her nickname, as we’ve defined it, as opposed to the real one. Now, what happens if we want to go back to the real one? Well, if we press Alt Control Windows N.
JAWS: List of WhatsApp nicknames to delete dialogue. List one, list two. Aiden, one of 12.
Brian Hartgen: I’ve got a lot in here. If I arrow down
JAWS: Amanda, three of 12. Louise, 10 of 12.
Brian Hartgen: There she is. I’m going to press enter.
JAWS: Louise removed.
Brian Hartgen: Louise has been removed. Well, how do we know that? If we press alt one…
JAWS: Lulu, “This is test message two.”
Brian Hartgen: It’s back to Lulu again. That shows you how you can really abbreviate things. If Lulu had not been in my contacts and she was part of a group, it might’ve said Lulu 074-7654-3210, something like that as being her cell phone number. Well, of course, you wouldn’t want to have that spoken all the time, so you can follow that procedure. When you press Alt Windows N, it will contain the name and the phone number. You’re just going to leave that as it is, then you’re going to assign that to an abbreviated form. It won’t recite the name of the phone number from that point forward, it will speak the abbreviation that you’ve assigned. It is possible to send someone a voice message. Now, upon careful research of this, it seems there is no limit as to the size of the voice message. Apparently, people have sent entire church services, for example, over WhatsApp.
What you are going to do is to locate the contact or conversation as we have been demonstrating so far, so you would’ve found the conversation in the chats list, you would press enter in order to move into it. Then you’re going to press Function key F1, so as to begin recording a voice message. Now, JAWS has been programmed not to say anything, because we don’t want any speech intruding into the voice message. That will be very unfortunate, but what you will hear is an ascending tone, and this will play to indicate that recording is about to start. I have ensured, when writing the JAWS scripts, that the sound again does not intrude into the recording, so we play the sound and then we start the recording afterwards. What you would do then is speak into your microphone and, should you wish to pause the recording, you can press Function key F1 a second time, whereupon you’ll hear a descending tone. We should be able to play that message back that we’ve recorded by pressing Function key F2.
If you want to send the message, you can certainly do so by pressing F3, and if you want to discard the voice message, you can press Function key F4. Let me demonstrate some of that. Am I in the Lulu conversation? Alt N.
JAWS: Lulu.
Brian Hartgen: Yes, I am. I’m going to press Function key F1 and I’m going to start talking. As promised, I am about to send the voice message and, hopefully, you will enjoy absolutely everything that I’m going to say. I’ve paused it now and I could resume that again by pressing Function key F1. Now then, if I press F2, as promised, I am about to send the voice message and, hopefully, you will enjoy absolutely everything that I’m going to say. You’ll hear that we didn’t get any extraneous sounds going on there or any speech that we don’t want. Now, I’ve decided that I’m not going to send that message after all, so I’m going to press Function key F4.
JAWS: WhatsApp recording dialogue. Are you sure you wish to cancel the recording? Yes, button Alt plus Y.
Brian Hartgen: I could press letter Y at this stage, because it says are we sure that we want to discard the recording? I could do that and it would never be heard of again, but I’m going to press N for no, because I perhaps do want to send it after all. Now, I am going to send it to her by pressing Function key F3.
JAWS: Brian. Audio duration, nine seconds. Type to Lulu edit.
Brian Hartgen: Now, there’s some interesting things about that, because the most recent message now that we have to Lulu is an audio message. If I press Alt 1…
JAWS: Brian. Audio duration, nine seconds, 14:24.
Brian Hartgen: It says that it’s nine seconds in length. If I press Alt 2…
JAWS: Lulu, “This is test message two,” 14:12.
Brian Hartgen: That was the message that she sent before. Now, there are two things you can do about this. We’re still in the typing edit field at this stage, so we could easily continue our conversation by text, but if we press Alt 1 twice quickly, because it’s an audio message, it’s not going to virtualize it. You can’t virtualize audio, can you? We’re going to play it instead. If I press Alt 1 twice now… As promised, I am about to send the voice message and, hopefully, you will enjoy absolutely everything that I’m going to say. There we are, we’ve played it right away. Where are we exactly?
JAWS: Type to Lulu edit.
Brian Hartgen: Still in the typing edit field. That is absolutely great, isn’t it? Now, if I press Alt M to go to our message list in the conversation, remember…
JAWS: Brian. Audio duration, nine seconds.
Brian Hartgen: Now, let’s just arrow up a little bit here.
JAWS: Lulu, “This is test message two.” 14:12, 9 of 10.
Brian Hartgen: Okay, and we’ll just listen.
JAWS: Brian. Audio duration, nine seconds.
Brian Hartgen: The first thing that you’re going to hear when you arrow to a message that contains audio is a little sound. I know it says “Audio,” but if you are skimming through messages very quickly, in order to find the audio content, then it may be helpful to hear a sound as the first item before you have to listen to all of the speech, because if the name is very long, if you haven’t assigned a nickname, it could take a while for JAWS to recite the name and possibly the phone number, and it might be helpful to hear an audio cue first. Let’s just discuss a little bit about calls, both making and receiving them. If you wish to make an audio or a video call, you are going to, again, find the conversation relating to the person you want to chat with or you would create a new one as we did earlier.
You’re going to press Enter to move inside the chat itself and then you’re going to press Alt A for an audio call or Alt V for a video call. The person will hopefully then answer and you can have a very high-quality audio or video conversation. Now, while in a call, you can Alt Tab then to a call application window. The title of it is “WhatsApp call.” From there, to query whether the microphone is muted or unmuted, you press Alt Windows M. To query whether the camera is active or not, you press Alt Windows C. M for microphone, C for camera. To end the call, you press Alt E, or you can press tab to reach the “End call” button and press the space bar. If you are receiving a call, it gets slightly problematic at this point, but assuming that the WhatsApp application is running in the background, in other words, if it’s in the Alt Tab order, you should be fine.
Where it gets a little bit problematic is if you’ve not got the WhatsApp application in the Alt Tab order. Let me give you the easy one first. If you do have it running and a call arrives from one of your contacts, you can press Alt Tab, and what you’ll find is that there is the aforementioned WhatsApp call window, and there are buttons in that window for accept call or decline call. Now, if you find that you can’t Alt Tab to it, one other good way of getting to it is to press JAWS key with F10 to bring up your list of applications. You can arrow down to that window and press enter, and you will find those buttons there. As I said, where it gets slightly difficult is if you’ve not got WhatsApp running and a call arrives. In that particular case, you will find a notification for it, when the call arrives, in the notifications area of Windows.
Finding that notification and performing an action on it is actually quite difficult in itself, and by the time you’ve found what you’re looking for, the person has probably given up. One good way of ensuring it’s completely accessible and usable for you is if you make the introductory call. Failing that, be sure that you always have WhatsApp in the Alt Tab order and you should be absolutely fine. One thing perhaps we ought to look at is how to attach a file to a WhatsApp conversation that’s going on. We’ve still got this conversation with Lulu open and I’m going to a test Microsoft Word document that I have created. Let’s just make sure I’m in the typing edit field with Alt T.
JAWS: Type to Lulu edit.
Brian Hartgen: Now, there is a dialogue box that you can navigate if you want, and we do have a shortcut key for it, it is Alt H, but I’m not going to do that, because dialogue boxes like this for browsing different files are somewhat convoluted, and as with Microsoft Outlook, there is an easier way to do this. I’m just going to go to the run dialogue with Windows key R.
JAWS: Run dialogue.
Brian Hartgen: I’m going to type in the path of where this file is stored and press Enter.
JAWS: See WhatsApp File Explorer,
Brian Hartgen: Let’s just find my file.
JAWS: Test document.docs.
Brian Hartgen: There it is, “Test document.” I’m going to copy it to the clipboard…
JAWS: Copied.
Brian Hartgen: With Control C. Alt Tab over to my conversation typing edit field.
JAWS: WhatsApp, type to Lulu edit.
Brian Hartgen: I’m going to press Control V to paste it.
JAWS: Pasted, pop up, caption optional edit.
Brian Hartgen: It says “Caption optional.” Well, I’d do like to put something in here, so the person at the other end knows why I’m sending the file. I don’t like just sending unsolicited files, so I’m just going to type, “This is a wonderful test document,” and press Enter.
JAWS: Type to Lulu edit. Brian, document, testdocument.docs, 13 kb, “This is a wonderful test document.”
Brian Hartgen: Now if I press Alt 1 to confirm…
JAWS: Brian, document, testdocument.docs. Microsoft Word document, 13 kb. “This is a wonderful test document.” 14:43.
Brian Hartgen: It reads the details of the file and it also reads my caption. Let’s pretend that we were the recipient of that file. How are we going to access it? Well, we’re in the conversation, so if I press Alt 1 twice quickly…
JAWS: Brian, document, testdocument.docs. Microsoft Word document.
Brian Hartgen: Arrow down.
JAWS: Link context menu for this message.
Brian Hartgen: Press Enter.
JAWS: Context menu, thumbs up sign.
Brian Hartgen: Arrow down.
JAWS: Reply, two of 12. Copy, three of 12. Save as… Four of 12.
Brian Hartgen: We’ve got a save as option here. Press Enter.
JAWS: Leaving menus, save as dialogue, file name, edit combo, testdocument.docs.
Brian Hartgen: That is a standard “Save as” dialogue box. I can easily browse to the individual folder that I want to save it to or, as I prefer to do, I can type in the path where I want that to be saved. If I was going to do that, I could press the home key, then type C:/wonderful documents/ and then my file name is there, and I can press enter and it will be saved in that location. There are some keyboard shortcuts that are worthy of a mention. Control + Shift + F allows you to find a message within a conversation. So if you have 1,500 messages in a chat, and you know that your friend sent you something specific, provided you know a key word or phrase within it, you can easily locate it. Control + Shift + N will allow you to create a group from members of your contacts. You are presented with a list of them. Press the spacebar on each one you wish to add, tab to the next button, and name your group. There is also the settings area, activated with Control + P—think preferences. Rather than tabbed pages, this is a list of settings categories. When you reach the list box, arrow down to the category you want and press Enter to move to the settings group. Notable options include, in the General category, the ability to change your name or status. The status button is labelled “About” and usually contains a one-line summary of something you wish to add to your name, such as your current mood. Other important options in settings include the kind of notifications you would like when specific events occur, setting your speakers and microphone for calling—which can be found in the Video and Voice category—and a list of keyboard shortcuts, many of which you already know. I have covered about 60% of what this application is capable of doing, and I’m afraid I’m almost out of time, but it is worth saying that, if you’d like to use ChatGPT within WhatsApp, OpenAI now provides an official way to do this through a service called 1800-ChatGPT. To get started, simply add the phone number 1800-242-8478 to your WhatsApp contacts.
That is 1800-242-8478. Once you’ve saved the number, open WhatsApp and send it a message. No account is required to begin chatting. Using ChatGPT in WhatsApp has several advantages, especially for those who prefer a simple and familiar interface. You can ask it questions, get help with writing, explore ideas, or have general conversations, or within the same app you already use for messaging friends or family. It’s also a great option for blind users, because it doesn’t require installing anything new or navigating unfamiliar websites. Everything happens in a standard WhatsApp chat, which works well with JAWS. It’s important to note, however, that ChatGPT on WhatsApp cannot give you real-time or live information, such as current news headlines or sports scores. Unlike some versions of ChatGPT that can access the internet or perform live searches, such as that found in our Leasey product, the WhatsApp version currently relies on its built-in knowledge, which may be a few months out of date.
While it’s excellent for general questions and practical tasks, it won’t be able to tell you today’s weather or breaking news. Now, I did say that you could use ChatGPT without an account, and you can, but you can also link your own ChatGPT account to WhatsApp if you have one. What are the advantages of doing that? The responses will be slightly faster, not too much faster, but a little. If you have set up custom instructions in your ChatGPT account on the web, these will be preserved when communicating with the service through WhatsApp. If you’ve taught it the way that you like to do things or the ways in which you would like information presented, you would get access to those facilities in WhatsApp. Similarly, as you will know if you’ve taken part in any of my AI training courses, ChatGPT can remember things if you have conversations with it.
Those memories too are available to you through WhatsApp. The process for linking WhatsApp to ChatGPT is not particularly well-documented, but I will go through it with you quickly. First, make sure that you have opened up ChatGPT in your web browser and that you are signed into your account. Next, browse to this link, chatgpt.com/link/whatsapp. You’ll be asked if you would like to use WhatsApp to open the programme, select “Yes.” You’ll then receive a message in your WhatsApp account, which will contain a link. Activate the link by tabbing to it and pressing Enter. Finally, consent to the fact that you would like WhatsApp to communicate with ChatGPT. That is all you need to do.
End of Presentation. Questions then followed.