Leasey And ALT Codes.

You may have come across a situation where you need to enter a character into your text edit area which is not present on your keyboard. As a basic example, what if you need to enter a pound sign and your keyboard layout does not accommodate it? This is where ALT codes come into play.

In some situations, there is a very nice and efficient way of entering such special characters by pressing and holding the ALT key, and simultaneously entering the character’s decimal value on the numeric keypad. This is where the term ALT codes comes from. For example, to enter the ellipsis, you could press and hold the ALT key, and enter 0133. This would give you the appropriate character. For the • character, you could enter the code 0149.
However, this requires you to turn NumLock on, (not intuitive for screen-reader users needing the NumPad), and this also presupposes that either there is a NumPad on your keyboard, or at least you can turn the central part of your keyboard into a numPad.

Unfortunately, on some modern notebooks, there are keyboards that do not have these possibilities. There is no NumLock key, and there is no mode to enter numbers, other than on the regular number row.

Sighted people experience this issue of being unable to enter ALT codes on modern notebook keyboards. There are two solutions to this one, and none of them works efficiently if you are blind. The solutions require you to use the Character Map application, or, alternatively, to use the On-Screen Keyboard to simulate NumLock.

For some time, JAWS has tried to replicate this functionality through its Insert Symbols dialog, JAWS Key+4. However, there are some problems with this.

• It is limited. It has only 49 symbols, and no way to add your own.
• It is not Unicode-aware.
• It does not expose ALT-values, nor does it allow you to enter ALT values. So, if your Style Manual tells you to type ALT+0171, this dialog is of no assistance.
• It has not been updated for many years.

What Can Leasey Do To Help?

Long-time JAWS user and beta tester Oleg Shevkun brought this problem to our attention. Oleg is from russia. He spends time preparing and hosting a daily program on Teos.Fm — a major Russian-language Christian Internet station. As part of this, he needs to write introductions to his programme segments, which must follow a certain style guide. Among other things, this includes the use of some characters that can be obtained with Alt-codes not ordinarily available to him on his keyboard.

Leasey version 7 now has a special tool for entering the ALT codes available. Pressing the key to start the process asks for the ALT code to be typed. For those who are very familiar with this practice, it is simply a matter of typing the code, pressing Enter and the relevant sign is inserted into the text area.
If the user presses the same keystroke again, the edit field contains the same code as previously entered in the event the sign needs to be repeated.

For those who are not familiar with the codes, if the edit field is vacant, pressing Enter will bring into view a list of all the ALT codes available. The description is given together with the code number. This serves two purposes. First, a code can be selected from the list and the Enter key pressed to insert the relevant sign. Second, giving the code values in this way helps anyone in learning them so that they can be entered manually at a later time, bypassing the list.

In the event a person prefers to use the list of codes constantly, focus never returns to the top of it each time it is entered. The option just used gains focus automatically in the event that the sign needs to be repeated.

Summary.

At Hartgen Consultancy, we think this is a useful tool which makes a Windows feature far easier to use than it otherwise would be and, as we've seen, in some situations it would be impossible to work with. It's the kind of feature which appeals to us and we hope Leasey users will benefit from it.