5 Reasons Why Should You Consider Microsoft Narrator

This article was written with the following specification:

Item	Name	Version
Screen Reader	Microsoft Narrator	Windows 10 November 2019 update
Operating System	Windows 10	Version 1903

Ah, Narrator, the most avoidable screen reader for every blind user. Less responsive, lacking in terms of functionality and frequently hang just to name a few.
But now no more. This spare tire screen reader can be just as good as your NVDA or JAWs on certain areas. And these are the 5 big reasons why:

1.       Narrator is responsive and fast

From my experience, Narrator will announce or read things on the screen with some slide delay. For instance, whenever we switch between running application, it will hang for a while, making me wondering what is happening. However, the current version is just as responsive as JAWs for Windows and NVDA

2.       Narrator has good human sounding synthesizer

In addition to Microsoft David, Microsoft has several good sounding Synthesizer, such as Mark, (English Us), Microsoft Richard (English Canada), Microsoft Hui Hui, (Simplified Chinese China), Microsoft Ichiro (Japanese) and even Microsoft Rizwan (Malay, Malaysia). As the name implies, Narrator can read just like your human friend in your university. With the new setting, adding voices is as easy as ABC. Just go to setting > Ease of Access > Narrator > add more voices > under manage voices group, go to add voices. You can use the search box to search for the voice that you want.

3.       Narrator has command key that you are familiar

From reading date and time with Insert / caps log + F12,, to jumping around in a webpages with H, K, T and other keys, Narrator is catching up with NVDA and Jaws. Though there are some keys differ from the 2 of the most popular screen readers, switching to Narrator will not put you under a lot of stress to relearn everything that you have used to.

4.       Narrator is equipped with tan of shortcut key for web browsing

As briefly mentioned, in the previous point, Narrator allows you to read through the internet with tan of shortcut keys that you are familiar, such as h for heading, k for link, t for tables and so on. In another word, Narrator has a mode for web browsing and reading mode known as Scan mode (which is equivalence to the Browse mode of NVDA). In fact, it can do even more in Windows 10, and Microsoft products such as the Office Products.

5.       Narrator is featured with different view mode

Narrator can jump through different objects on your screen by changing its view mode. This include Items, form fields, sentences, paragraphs, and more, just like Talk Back on Android. To access to the different view mode in Narrator, press Insert/Caps Log + Page up or down to change the mode and press Insert/Caps Log + right / left curser to jump to the previous or next item according to the selected view mode. Based on my experience, Narrator is the first of its kind to be able to perform such action on Windows PC.

Although my favourite screen reader is still NVDA, Narrator has seriously caught my attention with its improvement. Guest what, this entire post is created with the help of Microsoft Narrator and Microsoft Edge!