Method 1 – Send from Microsoft Office
| If you’re using a Microsoft Office application to create your document like Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, you can create an outgoing email with the desired file attached from that program. |
| Open the document you want to send in its corresponding application (i.e. if it’s a .DOCX file, open it in Word or if it’s a .XLSX, open it in Excel). |
| Use Alt + F to open the File Menu. |
| Use the up or down arrow keys to navigate through the File Menu until you find Share, and press enter or space bar. |
| Use the up and down arrow keys to navigate the Share menu until you find Email, and press enter or space bar. |
| When you select Email in the Share menu, the first option you’ll hear in the Email menu is Send As Attachment. Press space bar or enter to activate this button. |
| A new email will open. The new email will contain no information (nothing in To, Subject, Message Edit, etc.), but the document you were just in will now be attached to the email. You’ll be able to verify this fact by navigating around the email message using Tab. You’ll find the attached file between the subject field and the body of the message. |
Method 2 – Navigate the Ribbon in Outlook
| This method will have you navigate the ribbon using Outlook. The benefit of this method is that it will allow you to attach any type of file, not just files that can be opened in Microsoft Office Applications |
| Create a new email using Ctrl + N |
| Press the Alt key to move into the ribbon. |
| Use the left and right arrow keys until you find the Insert Tab. |
| When you’ve found the Insert Tab, use Tab to move into the Ribbon controls. You can move forwards and backwards through the Ribbon tab using Tab and Shift Tab repsectively. Navigate the Insert Tab until you find Attach File, and use enter or space bar to activate this control. |
| A Windows File Explorer Window will open. You can navigate throughout the parts of this window by using tab and within a part by using the up and down arrow keys. The section of this Window that is titled “Tree View” will let us move between sections of our computer’s harddrive, such as: Desktop, Documents, Music, Pictures, and the C drive. Your files are most likely going to be in the Documents folder, which will be the default area for this Window (which means that your hopefully won’t need to use Tree View. The section of the interface where you will find your document folders and files is called the Documents Library, but it is not labeled by JAWS. Using Windows 7, you’ll find this section between “Folder – insert F1 Help” and the “Name Split Button”. |
| You can navigate the documents library by using the up and down arrow keys. In this section you’ll find folders and files. You can distinguish folders from files because files have file type extensions and folders do not. What does that mean? If I save a word document and name it “Test” the full name of the file will be “Test.docx”. The .docx is tagged on because it tells you what type of file Test is. Folders, on the other hand, do not have file types. So, in our documents library, we can distinguish folders from files on whether or not we hear a file extension. File extensions always start with periods. You’ll find a table of common file types and extensions at the end of this guide. |
| If your file is within one of the folders in the documents library, you can simply open the folder by pressing enter. You’ll now find a whole new set of files and folders in your document library section (assuming your folder isn’t empty). Subfolders behave exactly the same as our main folder did. If you’d like to go back to your main documents section, you can use Alt + Left Arrow to move back a layer in Windows Explorer. |
| Once you’ve located your desired file, press enter. The Windows File Explorer window will close and your file will be attached to your new blank email. |
Attaching Multiple Documents?
| It is possible to attach more than one document to an email. To do this, we’ll need to use Method 2. Note that there are file size limits for attachments sent via email. Outlook will block attachments that exceed 20 MB. How do you know if you’re going exceed this limit? When you’re in Windows Explorer and you’ve located your desired file, you’ll find extra information about your file when you use the left and right arrow keys. Moving right from Name, you’ll find Date Modified (last time the file was saved), Type (the type of file it is), and finally Size (the size of file). Note that if you use the up and down arrow keys when you’re in any of the other information fields, you’ll move to other files and folders in the document library. Simply use the left arrow key to move back to the name field. How many KB is an MB? You’ll find a table of file sizes. |
| Typically, we won’t need to worry about hitting our file size limit if we’re sending a 2 to 5 standard sized documents. Also, a typical method to see if you’re under the file size limit is to simply attach the files and attempt to send. You’ll get an error message if the message can’t be sent. You could play it safe and keep a running total of your data, but that might be a cumbersome process. |
| So, how do we go about attaching multiple files? Well, for starters, you can simply go through Method 2 multiple times. However, instead of opening a new email each time, simply restart the process on the second step using the email that already contains attachments. |
| You could also speed up this process by selecting multiple documents at the same time in Windows Explorer! The only catch is they need to be in the same folder. If that isn’t a deal breaker, here is how we do it: You can select multiple documents one of two ways. If your documents appear contiguously in the folder, you can use the Shift key. When you find the first file you’d like to select, start holding shift. Now, navigate using the up or down arrow keys to the next document(s) you’d like to attach. For example, say we open our documents library and we find three files titled “Test1.docx”, “Test2.docx”, and “Test3.docx”. The files appear one after the other, starting with Test1.docx and ending with Test3.docx. If we press shift when we hear Test1.docx and then press down arrow, we’ll hear Test2.docx. If we continue and press down arrow once more, we’ll hear Test3.docx. Now, press enter and you’ll attach all three documents to the email. |
| What if you only want to attach Test1.docx and Test3.docx? Unfortunately, we will not be able to do this using shift. Anytime we try to select one and move to three, we’ll always end up selecting two! But there is another way. We can use Ctrl! You can use the Ctrl key to select files that are not continguous. If I move to Test1.docx and then hold control and use down arrow, you’ll now hear, “Not selected Test2.docx”. You can use space bar to add another file to the selection. |
| Not sure what you have selected? Remember, you can always use Shift + Insert + Down Arrow to read the current selection. |
| Also, keep in mind you don’t need to keep shift and ctrl pressed down constantly – only when you’ve moving around with JAWS. For example, say I use Ctrl to select two documents. I can let go of Ctrl to do my read selection command. I only need to make sure Ctrl or Shift is pressed when I move with the arrow keys. |
Common File Types
| Microsoft Word Document | .DOC |
| Microsoft Word Open XML Document | .DOCX |
| Outlook Mail Message | .MSG |
| OpenDocument Text Document | .ODT |
| Rich Text Format File | .RTF |
| Plain Text File | .TXT |
| Comma Separated Values File | .CSV |
| Data File | .DAT |
| PowerPoint Presentation | .PPT |
| PowerPoint Open XML Presentation | .PPTX |
| XML File | .XML |
| MPEG-4 Audio File | .M4A |
| MP3 Audio File | .MP3 |
| MPEG-2 Audio File | .MPA |
| WAVE Audio File | .WAV |
| Windows Media Audio File | .WMA |
| iTunes Video File | .M4V |
| Apple QuickTime Movie | .MOV |
| MPEG-4 Video File | .MP4 |
| MPEG Video File | .MPG |
| DVD Video Object File | .VOB |
| Windows Media Video File | .WMV |
File Size Chart
| 1024 bytes | KB | Kilobyte |
| 1024 KB | MB | Megabyte |
| 1024 MB | GB | Gigabyte |
| 1024 GB | TB | Terabyte |
| 1024 TB | PB | Petabyte |
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