Wikipedia Guide

A guide for Jaws users, written by Chorlton Workshop for hsbp.

Introduction

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute, and a typical page has contributions from several people. The web address of the english version is en.wikipedia.org. It is well written for Jaws users: there are plenty of headings, and the default search is easier than using google.

Page structure

This is the overall structure of the pages on the Wikipedia website:

• Link to navigation.
• Link to search.
• Main content.
• Navigation. This has a level 5 heading, and includes a link to the main page (home page).
• Search. This has a level 5 heading.

Main page

The home page of the wikipedia website is called the main page. The title of the page is “Main Page - Wikipedia, the free encycopedia”, and the level 1 heading is Welcome to Wikipedia.

The main content includes the following sections, which have level 2 headings: Today's featured article, Did you know..., In the news, and On this day.

Searching

On each page of wikipedia, there's always at least one edit box for searching, and this is the first form control on the page. So to perform a search:

1. Move to an edit box. If you have a recent version of Jaws, you can use E to move to the edit box. Otherwise, press CTRL + HOME to move to the top of the page, and then press F. Also the search edit box has an access key s, so that ALT + S should take you to the edit box, but it doesn't always work.
2. Press ENTER to go into Forms mode, type in your search terms, and press ENTER. Wikipedia finds the best match between your search terms and the titles of all the articles on the site, and then displays the article. If it can't find a match, it does a full search against the text of the articles, and then displays a results page which is described in a section below.

Note that if you want to ensure a full search rather than first trying to match to article titles, then instead of pressing ENTER after entering the search terms, TAB to the search button and press it. When Wikipedia is busy, this full search is not always available.

Article page

The page title is “article title - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”, and the level 1 heading is the title of the article.

An article can include the following sections each with a level 2 heading:

• Contents. This consists of a list of this page links to the remaining sections of the article. Using Jaws, you can also get the same functionality by browsing through the headings.
• External links.

Results page

The page title is “Search - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”, and the level 1 heading is Search.

• The first of up to 20 results are shown in a list. Each item in the list consists of an article title which is a link, and the relevancy to your search terms.
• If you move to a search edit box on this page, note that your previous search terms are in the box, and are not selected. If you want to overwrite them, press CTRL + A before entering your new search terms.