When I purchased my Lenovo Yoga Pro 2 laptop a little over a year ago from Future Shop, I had the tech guys there go into the bios and set the function keys to behave the way I needed for Jaws use. I had a bit of a fight to get them to do this, but insisted they do it or I would purchase the laptop somewhere where they would do it for me. It took the tech guy all of 3 minutes to do this. Don’t forget, when you are spending good money, that you have a right to have your laptop set up in a way that will work for you. It’s much easier to get them to do it before the sale is made! :).
Thanks, Russell > On Jan 31, 2016, at 3:44 PM, Brian Vogel <[email protected]> wrote: > > For all I know the following may apply to some desktops and/or all-in-ones, > too, but I've not yet encountered it in these environments. > > Since the beginning of the laptop, convention had been that the function keys > across the very top of the keyboard required the Fn key that's nested along > the very bottom of the keyboard to be held before hitting a given function > key to make it perform whatever function the manufacturer defines for that > key. Most people are familiar with function keys to do things like: volume > up, volume down, mute, wireless on/off, brightness up, brightness down, etc. > > There is a new feature that HP, at least, calls "Action Keys Mode" which > turns this convention on its head. When activated, this makes a simple press > of a given function key trigger its function rather than being passed along > to whatever application as a key press. This can have some "interesting" > effects for screen reader users. This function is currently enabled by > default on my laptop and the F6 key so happens to be the Mute on/off toggle > key. When using NVDA, if I press F6 it simply toggles the mute state. In > order to make it behave as F6 normally would I must hit Fn+F6. This does not > apply if the SHIFT is pressed along with F6 in order to reverse the > direction. That works perfectly well. I can only imagine the chaos this > could unleash if you start using the various commands that employ the > function keys on a system with Action Keys Mode activated. > > Action Keys Mode can be disabled, but it is controlled via UEFI/BIOS. On my > machine one disables it by activating the UEFI menu by doing a repeated ESC > key press during boot and selecting F10 choice. Once the old-fashioned > BIOS-like screen pops up, you have to transition to the System Configuration > pane and arrow to the Action Keys Mode entry and disable it. Since this is > done well before the operating system is even involved, I don't know of a > single screen reader that could be active to accomplish the task. > > Since this mode is controlled by the hardware ahead of any intervention by > anything else, you must disable it if you wish your function keys to operate > "the way they always have." > > Brian > >
