Dialog Box Guide

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

Introduction

Some common uses of dialog boxes are:

• Asking a question, like "Do you want to save the changes to Document1?", or "Do you really want to delete these files?".
• Allowing the user to enter some options before doing something. For example, the Print dialog has options for selecting the range of pages, and the number of copies you want to print
• Setting overall options for the program. Nearly all programs have an Options dialog which is on the Tool menu.

Structure of dialog boxes

Dialog boxes contain the following components:

• Title bar. To read the title bar, press INSERT + T.
• Controls. Dialog boxes contain objects called controls: buttons, check boxes, combo boxes, edit boxes, etc. Full descriptions of these are given in the separate Controls guide. To move to to the next control press TAB, and to the previous control press SHIFT + TAB.
• Pages. A dialog box can consist of either a single page, or multiple pages. When you enter a multi-page dialog box, Jaws tells you the name of the current page. To move to the next page, press CTRL + TAB, and to the previous page, press CTRL + SHIFT + TAB.
• Overall action buttons. These are a group of buttons for choosing the overall action of the dialog box, and are described in the following section.

To read the complete contents of the Dialog box at any time, press INSERT + B.

Overall action buttons

The overall actions buttons are a small group of buttons for choosing the overall action of the dialog. They're normally along the bottom or right hand side of the dialog box.

Default button

One of these buttons is set as the Default button, and is the most likely action for the dialog box. It is indicated visually by a bold outline, and Jaws tells you the name of the button if you press INSERT + E. In general, irrespective of which control has the focus, you can press the default button by simply pressing ENTER — you don't have to move to the button to press it. An exception to this occurs when the focus is on a button other than the default button. In this case, either the button with the focus temporarily becomes the default button, or the default button is undefined. In either case, to press the original default button you can either move to a control which isn't a button and press ENTER, or move to the default button, and then press it.

Cancel button

There is normally a Cancel button, which closes the dialog box without taking any action. Irrespective of which control has the focus, you can always press the Cancel button by pressing ESC. In fact, even if there isn't a Cancel button, you can always close a dialog without taking any action by pressing ESC.

Examples

These are some examples of the overall action buttons:

• In the Print dialog, the buttons are: OK and Cancel, and the default button is OK.
• If you close Word without saving a document, a dialog box asks if you want to save the document. The overall action buttons are: Yes, No, and Cancel. The default button is Yes.

Controls

These are now described in the separate Controls guide.