14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is working around the clock on polishing the accessibility side of its desktop operating system, so the company has recently started testing a series of Narrator improvements that are now exclusive to insiders.
The purpose of this early test is to see how Narrator improves the browsing experience with Microsoft Edge, as the firm says it has found a way to make the dialogs feel more natural and doing some operations, such as editing text, should now be a more straightforward process.
“When navigating the web, you can have Narrator read the current item (e.g., current page, current time etc.) and when you need to sort a table on the web, Narrator will announce the sort order you’ve selected (e.g., ascending, descending). We also made it simpler to know when an item is selected in a tree view control and to know the state of a checkbox when these are part of a list. We also improved link navigation, and you will find that tabbing through links on a webpage and pressing Enter will always take you to the link destination,” Microsoft explains.
Narrator improvements available in preview stage
Certain features are only part of the Canary builds of Microsoft Edge, and this means it’ll take a while until they are part of the stable channel.
“When you encounter a dialog box on the web, Narrator will help you stay focused within the dialog box and prevent navigation to the content that’s behind it. This improvement is currently available in Microsoft Edge Canary builds. Lastly Narrator has a few improvements for when you are editing text on the web. First, if you are deleting text on a form field, Narrator will read the character that was deleted and if you need to cut a large set of text with Control + X, Narrator will confirm that the text has been cut,” the company says.
At this point, there’s no ETA as to when the new Narrator experience should become available for everybody, but this is likely projected to happen in the second half of the year.