I teach as an adjunct. As I have Carpal Tunnel Syndrome fairly badly, I use a screen reader to go through papers. I want to read the footnotes as well as the main text. However, as far as the screen reader is concerned, and as MS Word, at least up to V.2007, footnotes are not treated like text on the page. They belong to something special and don't behave like the rest of a page's contents. Is there a setting I can adjust that will tell Word, for the purposing of reading, to treat footnotes like they were simply more text at the bottom of the page? That way, the screen reader would hopefully read the footnotes. Thanks.



Duncan

That really depends on what screen reader you're using. You should ask its makers, as this really isn't something Word can do anything about.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

If I want to change the font of the main body of a document that has footnotes and select it all to do that, footnotes are ignored. The last I looked, you could tell Word whether you even wanted to see footnotes or not. That tells me that MS Word has decided to treat footnotes differently from anything else. There's no way to change that? Thanks.

Yes, Word treats footnotes differently; so too does it treat headers, footers and textboxes differently. None of that has anything to do with how your screen reader treats whatever it reads from the screen. If you saved your document as a PDF, that would flatten the lot, but I doubt it would have any effect on how your screen reader treats things; in Word, at least, if your screen reader had the capacity to recognise what a footnote reference is, it could be configured to treat them differently, too.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Paul,

Thanks for your response. Since Word treats these items as different, refusing to let me change the font on footnotes and main text simultaneously, there must be an MS Word code that tells the formatting code to skip the rest of the page one way or another so that it does not touch footnotes or somehow store footnotes in a way that they cannot be seen by the formatting code. Screen readers, at least the ones I know about, do not literally read the display. They read the text or HTML alt-text. Therefore, there is something in the MS Word encoding that tells whatever program is reading the text, including MS Word itself, to ignore the text that is not part of the main body of the document. That is not the screen reader's doing. It's Word's doing. If there was a way in MS Word to tell MS Word to treat footnotes the same way it treats the main text, e.g., select all at once, change the font all at once, this would not be a problem for my screen reader. It takes extra software for a screen reader to do OCR reading of a document and that is not what I'm asking for. Thanks.

See my previous reply. There is no Word setting for what you want. Period. You might at least ask your screen reader's maker whether it can be configured to behave the way you want it to.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

OK, thanks. To me, after many years as a software developer, this is a failure on the part of the designers/programmer(s) for MS Word. Since they are unlikely to change this, I will indeed try to find a screen reader that does the right thing.