Hi,My wife bought me a HP stream for Christmas, I love it except for the functions going back to having to hold down the FN key to get F1 through F12. Have a great one.
-----Original Message----- From: Soronel Haetir
Sent: Monday, February 1, 2016 12:44 PM To: [email protected]Subject: Re: Action Keys Mode - A Warning to Those Buying Certain New Laptops
Unfortunately this is only a temporary fix, at least for HP laptops. HP laptops revert whenever the bios is updated and that has happened several times with the one I have now. Thankfully I live with a seeing eye human so when that happens getting it fixed is fairly easy. On 1/31/16, Russell Solowoniuk <[email protected]> wrote:
When I purchased my Lenovo Yoga Pro 2 laptop a little over a year ago fromFuture Shop, I had the tech guys there go into the bios and set the function keys to behave the way I needed for Jaws use. I had a bit of a fight to getthem to do this, but insisted they do it or I would purchase the laptop somewhere where they would do it for me. It took the tech guy all of 3minutes to do this. Don’t forget, when you are spending good money, that youhave a right to have your laptop set up in a way that will work for you. It’s much easier to get them to do it before the sale is made! :). Thanks, RussellOn Jan 31, 2016, at 3:44 PM, Brian Vogel <[email protected]> wrote: For all I know the following may apply to some desktops and/or all-in-ones, too, but I've not yet encountered it in these environments. Since the beginning of the laptop, convention had been that the functionkeys across the very top of the keyboard required the Fn key that's nestedalong the very bottom of the keyboard to be held before hitting a givenfunction key to make it perform whatever function the manufacturer definesfor that key. Most people are familiar with function keys to do things like: volume up, volume down, mute, wireless on/off, brightness up, brightness down, etc. There is a new feature that HP, at least, calls "Action Keys Mode" which turns this convention on its head. When activated, this makes a simple press of a given function key trigger its function rather than being passed along to whatever application as a key press. This can have some"interesting" effects for screen reader users. This function is currentlyenabled by default on my laptop and the F6 key so happens to be the Mute on/off toggle key. When using NVDA, if I press F6 it simply toggles the mute state. In order to make it behave as F6 normally would I must hitFn+F6. This does not apply if the SHIFT is pressed along with F6 in orderto reverse the direction. That works perfectly well. I can only imagine the chaos this could unleash if you start using the various commands that employ the function keys on a system with Action Keys Mode activated. Action Keys Mode can be disabled, but it is controlled via UEFI/BIOS. Onmy machine one disables it by activating the UEFI menu by doing a repeatedESC key press during boot and selecting F10 choice. Once the old-fashioned BIOS-like screen pops up, you have to transition to the System Configuration pane and arrow to the Action Keys Mode entry and disable it. Since this is done well before the operating system is even involved, I don't know of a single screen reader that could be active to accomplish the task.Since this mode is controlled by the hardware ahead of any intervention byanything else, you must disable it if you wish your function keys to operate "the way they always have." Brian
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