Vista’s Narrator, your head, and the wall
It’s a laudable idea. One of Vista’s “ease of access” features is something called the Narrator. StartAll ProgramsAccessoriesEase of AccessNarrator. In theory, it can read your documents aloud to you. Nice, eh? If you’re blind or just tired, sit back and leave the reading to the Narrator.
Except that it doesn’t work with Word 2007 (or Word 2003 for that matter). Some useful shortcut keys that allow you to quickly make this determination are:
| CTRL | Stop Narrator from reading text |
| INSERT+F3 | Read the current character |
| INSERT+F4 | Read the current word |
| INSERT+F5 | Read the current line |
| INSERT+F6 | Read the current paragraph |
| INSERT+F7 | Read the current page |
| INSERT+F8 | Read the current document |
In Word, any of the Insert+F key assignments tell you “Empty document,” “Empty page,” and so on. A feeble work-around is to copy the text into WordPad or Notepad, where Narrator works just fine. But, don’t waste a lot of time trying to get it to work for you in Word 2007 or 2003—or even in Internet Explorer. I’ve already wasted a bunch of time for you, so you don’t have to waste your own. It’s just one of the many services I’m more than happy to provide.
I’ll let you know when and if there is a fix.
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