curser keys and six pack
These keys are a duplicate set of keys on the keyboard. This is because laptopsdont usually have a numberpad and/or some people may need to keep the number pad in the calculator position for quicker convenients. There are two sections that we will be talking about in this lesson. The curser keys and what we call the "six pack" of keys. We have combined the two groups of keys because of their nature in size and they are the smallest groups.
The Curser Keys
The curser keys are located at the front of the keyboard and between the number pad and the typing keypad. There are four keys that are shaped like a triangle or an up-side-down letter T. You can think of them as directional keys; they will move you all four directions in your document, up, down, left and right. They are positioned as follows.
The one on top is the up arrow.
The one underneath is the down arrow.
Moving to the left of the down arrow is the left arrow.
To the right of the down arrow is the right arrow.
If you press the left or right arrow keys, you will move one letter at a time. We like to think of it as one character at a time. This includes the punctuations, numbers and symbols as in grater than and less than signs, the equals, the dash and so on. They are all one character and when you move left or right, JAWS will speak that character to you.
Pressing the up and down arrow keys will move you one line up or down depending on the corresponding key. Press the down arrow and you will move one line down the page. Naturally if you press the up arrow key, you will move back up the page one line at a time. Practice using these keys to reread through this lesson.
The Six Pack of
Keys
The six pack is called that because of there are six keys in this group. They are located directly above the arrow keys. There are two rows of three and they are listed by name as follows.
Row 1:
The insert key. This is not used very much; but, it turns on a feature that allows you to either insert what you type in the middle of your text and or type over it.
Top row, middle key, is the home key. This key, when pressed, will take you to the
extreme left of the line you are on or, to the top of a list of files.
Top right key is the page up key. This key will move you up about 25 lines in
your document if there are that many lines.
If you don't have that many lines, then it will take you to the top
line; however, you may not be at the beginning of that line.
The lower left is the delete key. This key, when pressed a single time, will delete the letter or title that is in focus.
The middle bottom key is the end key. This key is the opposite than the home key. It will move you to the end of the current line you are on or, to the bottom title of the list of files.
And the last key on the bottom right, is the page down key. This key when pressed once will move you down the page about 25 lines in your document if there are that many lines. If you don't have that many lines, then it will just take you to the bottom line; again, you may not be at the beginning of that line.
So you see why you will be using these keys quite often. It will take some getting use to develop habits of when to use these keys. You will find yourself wanting to use them as soon as you begin writing a lot. Have fun practicing!
End of lesson
Now that you know where all the keys are on the keyboards, you are ready to learn how to press more than one at a time to activate a command to cause your computer to perform a specific action. Press enter on the next link to learn about keyboard commands. Keyboard commands,
End of lesson