Using the JAWS Scripts For Youtube
Doug Lee
Last Revised October, 2023

This guide provides tips for using these scripts with Youtube and Youtube Music, collectively referred to as Youtube except where differences must be noted. When the scripts are installed and Youtube is open and focused in a supported browser, this document can be opened via a double press of JAWSKey+F1 (or Insert+F1).

Note that Youtube provides many keystrokes that do not require scripts, though they usually do require forms mode, pass-key-through, or disabling of the virtual cursor. These scripts simplify using some native commands while providing a few other shortcuts not provided by Youtube itself.

Table of Contents

• System Requirements For JAWS Users
• Script Installation Instructions
• Key Sequences
• Using Youtube With JAWS and the Scripts
• Special Script Support For Live Stream Text Chatting
• Reading Caption Text
• Known Issues
• Why Youtube Scripts?
• Revision History

System Requirements For JAWS Users

These scripts require the following for correct operation with the Youtube web site:

• JAWS 17.0.1806 or greater. (JAWS versions prior to 17.0 do not support web site specific scripts.) The original JAWS 17.0 release did not include the GetElementXML() function that was added in the JAWS 17.0.1806 release in April, 2016.
• A browser supported by JAWS 17.0 or later. At this writing, these are Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, and Microsoft Edge at least in sufficiently new JAWS versions and since Edge began using Chrome-based technology.

Script Installation Instructions

To install these scripts on a new system:

1. Load JAWS if this has not already been done. This will require administrative privileges on the computer.
2. Run JAWS as the user for whom the scripts are to be installed. This and the following steps must be performed for each user of the computer who will be using JAWS with these scripts.
3. Download and run, or run directly, the installer for these scripts; and follow the on-screen directions. Be sure to install the scripts in the currently running JAWS version if a JAWS version list is presented.
4. To verify successful installation, type Insert+Q while Youtube is in focus in a supported browser. Part of the JAWS spoken response should be a revision number. If you do not hear a revision number, the scripts are not correctly loaded.

Key Sequences

These scripts incorporate commands that consist of sequences of keystrokes, all beginning with a common prefix, or "command keystroke." This approach allows many script commands without the risk of conflicting with application keystrokes. See the "Multi-Key Command Sequences" section of the "Common Script Elements" document for further details, including how to explore the available script commands (similar to exploring a menu system), and how to change the Command keystroke if necessary.

By default, the Command keystroke for these scripts is [. This document may refer to this keystroke as [ or Command; so, for example, [ Tab and Command Tab both refer to typing the prefix keystroke, then separately the Tab key. Some sequences may consist of more than two keystrokes, or "levels"; for example, [ d r would refer to typing [, then d, then finally r.

Using Youtube With JAWS and the Scripts

The scripts provide the following key sequences:

[ S

Skip Ad. If a video ad is playing and a Skip button is present and clickable, this command will click it to make Youtube start playing the actual video requested.

[ R

Jump to the top of the right-side column of material on the page, when possible. This turns out to be a fast way to skip past the scrollable Comments section for a video to reach the rest of the page, e.g., other videos to play.

[ Space

Press the Play/Pause button if present. This works in both virtual cursor mode and forms mode.

[ T

Say Time. This command will speak the current time position in the playing video as well as the video's length. This command also works on Youtube live streams. If a Youtube Short is playing and it is longer than 30 seconds and shows a progress bar, this command will announce the percentage complete. If a video ad is playing, the times will relate to the ad rather than to the requested video. Note: The current time position is not always kept up to date by Youtube itself but will be updated if the video is paused and restarted or the play position is changed by the user.

[ 1 and [ Shift+1

Speak any currently displayed video caption text, or cause JAWS to announce such text automatically as it appears until focus leaves the current video window. See the Reading Caption Text section for further information on these features.

[ 2

Speak the current video's subtitle or chapter name if present. This may, for example, announce the name of the current song or track on a playing album. Not all videos support this Youtube feature. This script command is likely to say "not found" when used on a video without this feature.

[ N and [ Shift+N

Move to the next or previous page or video. This should work in playlists and wherever a Next and Previous button can be found. As of May, 2019, these commands work in Youtube Music to move among songs in the active queue. Note that the Previous button in a playlist or queue may restart the current video rather than moving to the previous video unless the video is near the beginning of its playback. Repeat the command to go to the previous video in this case.

[ M

Mute or unmute the current video. See also the M native Youtube command below.

[ V

Move focus to the volume slider for the currently playing video. This also switches JAWS into forms mode and causes a number of native Youtube keystrokes to become usable.

[ C

Go to the Youtube channel that owns the current video. This command only works on a video page and does not work for Youtube Music.

The following Youtube-native keystrokes work as indicated when JAWS is in forms mode or if the keystrokes are passed through JAWS directly to Youtube, such as with the JAWS "pass next key through" command, Insert+3. As noted in the below list, some Youtube keystrokes require focus to be on the video's volume slider. Except where noted, these commands do not apply to Youtube Music pages. Use a question mark (Shift+/) on those pages to get a list of native keystrokes.

Space (slider focus required) or K

Pause, resume, or play the current video. Works on Youtube Music pages.

J or L

Rewind or fast-forward the video by a few seconds.

Digits 1 through 9 and 0 (slider focus required)

Jump to a percentage through the video. 0 jumps to the beginning, 1 to 10% through, 2 to 20% through, etc., and 9 to 90% through.

Comma (comma) or Period (period)

Slow down or speed up the video without changing its pitch. This amounts to simple compression or expansion of the audio and video. Slowing down far enough may stop playback.

Up or Down arrows (slider focus required)

Turn up or down the volume of the video by increments of 5%. Right and Left arrows, respectively, perform the same actions and also require focus to be on the volume slider. The volume usually defaults to 100%.

M

Mute or unmute the sound of the video. Beware that the occasional video defaults to muted on starting, though this seems rare. Works on Youtube Music pages.

Home (slider focus required)

Mute the audio. This is not a toggle like M.

End (slider focus required)

Unmute the audio and move the volume to 100%. This is not a toggle like M.

F

Toggle between full screen and normal video size. Works on Youtube Music pages.

/ (slash)

Move focus to the Youtube search box. Works on Youtube Music pages.

Apostrophe (apostrophe)

Pop open and move focus to the Find bar for about four seconds.

Special Script Support For Live Stream Text Chatting

The scripts include a system for handling text chatting during a live stream: Type the prefix key, the left bracket ([) by default, then type as many of the following keys as desired to navigate among chat messages. Press Esc to exit the chat review mode when done. The navigation keys comprise the right-hand portion of the home row on a standard English US QWERTY keyboard: H goes to and reads the first message, J the previous from current position, L the next from current position, and the semicolon (;) the last message available. K repeats the last-read message.

Note that the above features also work in a stream playback after the stream has ended; however, observe the following caveats:

• When the recording begins playing, the chat area will contain a note indicating that chat messages will appear at the times they were initially added. This note will be replaced with actual chat messages when they begin to appear. As a result, the reading position may be invalidated when messages begin to appear in the window.
• As messages appear during playback at the times they were originally added during the live stream, it is necessary to fast-forward to the end of the stream to gain access to all posted chat messages.
• Rewinding the stream will also remove chats from the display and may invalidate the current reading position.
• If chat reading commands begin producing beep sounds instead of reading messages, reset the reading position with Alt+Home or Alt+End.

Reading Caption Text

These scripts offer two command sequences for handling closed caption (sometimes also called subtitle) text:

• [ 1 announces any currently displayed caption text. If no text is found, JAWS will say "no text."
• [ Shift+1 turns on the automatic announcement of caption text as it appears. Caption text will then be announced continuously until focus next leaves the current video window.

When available, caption text tends to be dialog or indicators of sounds in a video. Sometimes, such indicators can be informative to blind viewers; for example, "[whirring of lift]" may indicate that a whirring sound comes from an elevator, which may not be obvious otherwise.

Closed captioning is turned on and off with Shift+C and is more finely controllable from the Youtube Settings menu. If neither of these script commands announces any text, make sure the feature is turned on in Youtube itself for the current video.

Note: The automatic announcement of caption text is currently considered experimental and is subject to various timing and completeness issues, especially for auto-generated caption and translation text. To turn off automatic caption announcement, either use Shift+C to toggle the display of captions off in Youtube itself, or Alt+Tab once out of and back into the video window.

The following issues are known to exist with auto-announcement of caption text:

• Some words or phrases may be missed when the text is auto-generated or auto-translated.
• Occasionally, a word or phrase may speak twice even when it only appears visually once. Beware, though, that words may legitimately appear multiple times visually as well, such as when the speaker in the audio track stutters or is interrupted by another person or event.
• Rarely but occasionally, JAWS may speak words or phrases out of order. This appears to occur when Youtube notifies JAWS of the appearance of text elements in a different order from that in which they visually appear. This author only observed this phenomenon one time during extensive testing of the auto-announce feature.

The rest of this section consists of notes on what can appear in caption text, the types of caption text that may be available, and what to expect from JAWS for each.

The following items may appear in caption text, according to this author's experience:

• Plain text indicates the words spoken by performers in the audio.
• Text in square brackets indicates sounds heard in the audio that are not words. Brackets may also be used to provide speaker names or to indicate that speakers are speaking in a language other than the language of the presentation as a whole. Examples:

  [ music ]
  [guns fire]
  [Joe] Heads up!
  [in Chinese]

• The eighth-note character (♪) is sometimes used to indicate music or singing.

Notes on types of captioning:

• Auto-generated caption text appears word by word as a video plays, scrolling continuously. This means that, at any given moment, the visible text will likely consist of what is currently being spoken and what was spoken very recently. Unfortunately, the auto-announcement feature does not always catch all of this moving text; some words may be missed.
• The same is true of auto-translated text, which consists of text in a chosen language that is different from the language of the video's audio track. Again, auto-announcement may miss parts of this text at this time.
• When the caption text type is simply named by its language, without "auto-generated" or indication of translation, it tends to appear in chunks rather than scrolling continuously. It also tends to be more accurate than auto-generated caption text in some cases, according to this author's experience. This text speaks far more effectively when auto-announcement is enabled, though from time to time a piece of text may speak twice.

Known Issues

Issues shown in this section may be fixed in future script revisions but are not addressed as of this writing.

Sometimes, [ V may announce the volume slider incorrectly. In this script author's experience, this only occurs after a great number of videos, such as 50, have been played without a browser restart.

Why Youtube Scripts?

As mentioned earlier, Youtube provides many keystrokes natively. However, most are blocked by JAWS' virtual mode (true for other screen readers as well), making them inconvenient to use in some situations. I wrote these scripts for at least the following reasons, not necessarily in order of precedence:

• Personal convenience (ok, that one was probably at the top).
• Potential usefulness to other JAWS users.
• A way to make more people aware of the keyboard support built into Youtube itself.
• In the words of a coworker and good friend, why not?

Revision History

Here is the revision history of these scripts, most recent revision first:

Revision 117, released October 21, 2023

• The [ T sequence for announcing video times will now announce the percentage completion of Youtube Shorts that show a progress bar. This happens for Shorts that are over 30 seconds long.
• Some videos were not correctly detected by the code for the [ Shift+1 sequence for setting up automatic caption announcement. This has been fixed.

Revision 115, released October 2, 2023

• Anyone who downloaded the briefly available script revision 112, before it was replaced with revision 114 on the same day, should download this update to fix a problem that applies to those who use these scripts but not my Discord scripts.
• The [ C sequence for moving to the channel that owns the current video now works with Youtube Shorts, moving to the channel to which the currently-playing video belongs.

Revision 114, released September 28, 2023

• The command sequence for moving to the previous video in a playlist is changed from [ P to [ Shift+N, for consistency with both JAWS itself and other scripts produced by this author.
• The command sequences for pressing Play/Pause ([ Space) and Mute/Unmute ([ M) work on Youtube Shorts. Since these tend to start playing automatically as the page scrolls during virtual cursor navigation, this is especially helpful in recovering the ability to hear JAWS speech.
• Various command sequences that stopped working on Youtube Music pages work there again:
  • [ Space for pressing Play/Pause.
  • [ M for toggling mute.
  • [ V for focusing the volume slider.
  • [ N and [ Shift+N for moving to the next and previous track in the queue.
• JAWS will correctly announce the name and status of Like and Dislike buttons on Youtube Music pages.
• [ 1 will speak the caption currently shown for a playing video if one is present, and [ Shift+1 will initiate automatic announcement of caption text as it appears. See the Reading Caption Text section for details on these features and on caption text in general.
• [ 2 will speak the subtitle or chapter name currently shown for a playing video, if one is present. This and the previous command sequences use numbers instead of shifted letters like Shift+C and Shift+S for three reasons:
  • To avoid mistakes like opening a video's channel with [ C instead of reading a caption.
  • To allow faster checking of a caption.
  • To leave room for any further elements that might deserve special access in the future with their own commands.
• By popular vote, old history entries in this document section are now hidden inside a details tag that may be expanded to show them. Among the benefits of this, heading count is reduced and text searches won't match very old material.

Revision 96, released January 23, 2023

• The scripts are more effective at finding Play and Pause buttons in some cases.
• The key sequence [ R jumps to the top of the right-side column of material on the page, when possible. This turns out to be a fast way to skip past the scrollable Comments section for a video to reach the rest of the page, e.g., other videos to play.