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 landmark regions, and the default search is easier than using google.

Page structure

• The main content of each page comes before the navigation section, which includes a search edit box.
• The page is divided into several landmark regions, which makes navigating the pages easier. If you're using Jaws 15 or later, press R or Shift + R to move to the next or previous landmark region respectively. Otherwise, press Semicolon or Shift + Semicolon to move to the next or previous landmark region respectively.
• At the beginning of the page there are links to both the navigation section, and the search.

Main page

The home page of the wikipedia website is called the main page and the title of the page is “Wikipedia, the free encycopedia”.

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. So to perform a search:

1. Press E to move to a Search edit box.
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 type the tilde character before typing in your search terms.

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 “ your search terms - Search results - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”, and the level 1 heading is Search results.

• 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.