Article 5 of 5 in Accessibility and Inclusion
Scrolling through a long Word document line by line is slow, and it gets tiring fast. If you read your documents by ear, you do not have to. Word has keyboard commands that take you straight to the start, the end, a page, a heading or a table, and your screen reader reads out exactly where you land.
In this post we will go through the commands that matter most. They work in Word for Windows with JAWS and with NVDA, and you can try each one in the next five minutes on any document you already have.
Start with the big jumps
Before anything else, learn the two commands that take you to the edges of the document.
- Ctrl+Home takes you to the very beginning of the document.
- Ctrl+End takes you to the very end.
These two alone save a lot of time. When you open a document you were working on yesterday, Ctrl+End puts you at the bottom, where you probably stopped.
Move by word, paragraph and page
When you only need a small move, use these instead of holding down the arrow keys.
- Ctrl+Left Arrow and Ctrl+Right Arrow move one word at a time.
- Ctrl+Up Arrow and Ctrl+Down Arrow move to the previous or next paragraph.
- Ctrl+Page Down and Ctrl+Page Up move to the next or previous page. This is the default behavior, and it is what you will use most of the time.
After each move, your screen reader reads the text where the cursor stopped. Listen for the first few words. That is usually enough to know whether you are in the right place.
Go straight to a page, heading or table
This is the command that changes how you work with long documents. Press Ctrl+G, or F5, to open the Go To box.
How to use it
- Press Ctrl+G. The Find and Replace box opens on the Go To tab.
- Press Tab until you reach the list called Go to what. Use the arrow keys, or type the first letter, to choose Page, Heading, Table or another item.
- Press Tab once more to reach the edit field. Type the number you want, for example 12 for page 12, or 3 for the third table.
- Press Enter. The cursor moves to that spot in the document.
- Press Escape to close the box. You stay exactly where you landed.
If you choose Heading, you can also type a plus or minus number, such as +1, to move to the next heading or back to the previous one. Try it on a document that has headings and listen to what your screen reader says.
Find a word and jump to it
When you remember a word or a phrase but not where it is, press Ctrl+F. This opens the Navigation pane with a search field. Type the word and press Enter, and Word moves to the first match. Press Escape to go back into the document, and the match stays selected so your screen reader reads it right away.
Go back to where you were editing
You jumped to page 40 to check something, and now you want to return to where you were typing. Press Shift+F5. Word takes you back to the last place you edited. Press it again and it moves through your recent editing spots, so you can step back more than once.
A simple way to practice
Open any document with at least five pages. Go to the end, go back to the start, jump to page three with Ctrl+G, search for a word you know is inside, and then press Shift+F5 to return. Do this once a day for a few days and the commands will stop feeling like a list you need to remember. They will become part of how you move.
This is only the first layer of working with Word by keyboard. Headings, tables, comments and reviewing changes each have their own commands, and they work best when you practice them in the right order with real documents. You can read more of our free tips on the IAT blog.
Ready to Transform Your Skills?
If you want to work in Word and the rest of Office with confidence, these courses will take you further.
- Microsoft Office Suite with Screen Readers (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
- JAWS for Windows Mastery – From Beginner to Advanced
- NVDA Screen Reader Complete Training
You can see everything we offer in the IAT course shop.