Make Word Treat Footnotes as simply more text

[doctorduncan]

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