JAWS Power Tips: Using JAWS Commands to Extract a Microsoft Teams Chat Transcript and a Similar Bonus Tip With Excel

I submitted the following tips to the FS Cast podcast from Freedom Scientific. Whether or not it gets mentioned on their podcast I decided to share them with my readers.

Introduction

My employer regularly hosts internal talks on Microsoft Teams relating to accessibility. As often happens during these meetings there is a chat which can optionally take place among the meeting participants where questions and comments can be written for others to view and respond. These meetings are hosted by my manager who one day asked me if I could provide him with a transcript of a chat session from these events. I researched this and couldn’t find any native commands from within Teams for extracting and saving a chat transcript. However, using commands which are specific to JAWS I figured out a fairly easy way to accomplish this task.

The Steps

First, I enter the Teams chat window for the meeting and move to the first line of the meeting. I then move down to the second line and immediately clear the speech history by pressing insert+space followed by shift+H. Next, I press up arrow and after hearing JAWS speak the first line I then press the down arrow key, forcing JAWS to speak one line at a time. As JAWS reads each line the output from the chat is also being copied into the speech history. I don’t have to hear each line spoken in its entirety; I can press the down arrow key as soon as JAWS speaks a few words from the line of text. Once I get to the bottom line of text in the chat window I press insert+space followed by ctrl+H to copy the contents of the speech history to the clipboard. I then open Microsoft Word and press ctrl+V to paste the contents of the clipboard ( the speech history) into my open document. I save the document with a meaningful title and I now have a complete chat transcript.

Bonus Tip: a Similar Trick Using Microsoft Excel

I do something similar with Microsoft Excel. Internally, we have an online form for employees who need to request specific services. I am tasked with extracting the contents of the form and relaying that information to the service provider. As the form uses Microsoft Forms I first initiate the option from within Forms to download the completed form as an Excel spreadsheet. Next, I open the form in Excel and instruct JAWS via the insert+V JAWS Options dialog to only speak the cell’s contents without speaking the cell coordinates. You’ll find this under the option “Cell Verbosity Content + Coordinates” and I press the space bar to change this setting to “Content Only.” You’ll understand why shortly.

Next, I move to column A1 and press the JAWS key along with ctrl+alt+C. What this does is to force JAWS to speak the column titles in this particular spreadsheet as I move from one column to the next.

Once this has been done I move to the row containing the information that I want to extract, with each column containing a bit of information from the form with column titles such as First Name, Last Name, Email Address, etc.

I move to the column before the first column containing the needed information and, as I did documenting my previous task with the Teams chat transcript, clear the speech history. Next, I repeatedly press the right arrow key. JAWS speaks the column title followed by the information from the requestor, such as First Name, David. Last Name, Goldfield, etc. without speaking cell coordinates such as d5, d6, etc. After JAWS speaks the contents of the last cell I copy the contents of the speech history to the clipboard.

Next, I compose an email to the service provider and paste the speech history which contains the needed information.