Dial user guide
This add-on was designed for keyboards with a physical volume dial, the kind you rotate to adjust volume and press (or click) to mute. If your keyboard has separate volume up, volume down, and mute keys instead, those work equally well. The dial is just the most natural way to use it.
Turn the dial to navigate. Press (or use your mute key) to launch. Everything is organised into categories you build yourself.
Topics
- Getting started: the key combinations you need first
- Dial mode: using the add-on when you have no dial
- Categories and items: adding, editing, and reordering
- Workspaces: opening multiple things with one activation
- Internet radio: playing a station straight from the dial
- Clipboard history and snippets: getting text back, and keeping text to hand
- Most Used: the auto-populated category
- Import and export: backing up and transferring your config
- How you control Dial: the dial, the keyboard, or both
- Troubleshooting: fixes for common problems
The key combinations
Each modifier owns one level, so once you know which key you are holding you know what the dial is moving through.
Hold the NVDA key for categories
- Next or previous category:
NVDA+ turn dial - Announce the current category:
NVDA+ press dial - Turn the radio off, from anywhere:
NVDA+ press dial twice
Hold Shift for items
- Next or previous item:
Shift+ turn dial - Launch the selected item:
Shift+ press dial
Shift + press dial twice is the item's second action, and it never opens the thing you are on. What it does depends on the type:
- a website copies its address instead of opening the page
- a folder tells you what is in it
- a file gives its size and when it changed
- a snippet pastes straight into what you are typing
- a station sets the sleep timer, or cancels it
- a workspace tells you what it holds
- a clock copies its reading, the time, the date and how far off it is
- an application, a help page and an NVDA command have no second action
Hold Control for clipboard history
- Move through what you have copied:
Control+ turn dial - Copy that entry back:
Control+ press dial - Paste it where your cursor is:
Control+ press dial twice
No dial, and keys of your own
- Dial mode on or off, putting all of the above on the arrow keys:
NVDA+Applications - Turn the radio off, and add 15 minutes to the sleep timer, both ship unassigned so they take no key from you. Set one for either in NVDA's Input Gestures, under Dial. See Internet radio.
The NVDA key and Shift work through what you have set up, categories and the items inside them. Control is separate: it reaches your clipboard history from wherever you are, without leaving what you are typing.
Each time you turn to a new category, the category name and number of items are announced. No separate confirmation press is needed.
Most items do a second thing when you press twice quickly, as the table shows. Where they do, you hear a short tick as you press and then a third of a second passes before Dial commits to what you meant. Copying is the exception: a snippet, a clipboard entry and a clock all act immediately and only the announcement waits, since copying and pasting are not opposites. An application, a help page and an NVDA command have nothing on a second press, and they wait too, so that two quick presses never opens or runs the thing you are on.