Screen Reader Settings: Win7 Built in Narrator

For similar pages about other screenreaders, see the page AT Settings.

This page shows an overview of Microsoft Narrator's UI settings and their location in the Windows registry.

Settings

Narrator settings are stored in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Narrator in the Windows registry. The location of the Narrator executable, together with some other settings is stored in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Accessibility\ATs\Narrator. Some other notes:

• Live configuration is not supported, i.e. when the Narrator is running, an update in the registry is not reflected in the UI. You need to close the Narrator and open it again for the changes to take place. As it seems, the settings are read from the registry only on application startup, though they are written every time you tinker with the UI. The same is true for Magnifier.
• Some keys might be non-existent (that's different than with no value!) if the corresponding settings haven't been used before, just as with Magnifier.

General:

UI Setting	Registry Name	Registry Type	Registry Data
Echo User's Keystrokes	EchoChars	REG_DWORD	0 or 1
Announce System Messages	AnnounceSystemMessages	REG_DWORD	0 or 1
Announce Scroll Notifications	AnnounceScrollNotifications	REG_DWORD	0 or 1
Start Narrator Minimized	StartType	REG_DWORD	0 or 1
Background Message Settings *	BackgroundMessageTimeout	REG_DWORD	Value in milliseconds

Voice settings:

UI Setting	Registry Name	Registry Type	Registry Data
Voice	CurrentVoice	REG_SZ	Voice Name **
Voice Speed	CurrentSpeed	REG_DWORD	1..9
Voice Volume (1-9)	CurrentVolume	REG_DWORD	1..9
Voice Pitch (1-9)	CurrentPitch	REG_DWORD	1..9

* Time period in the UI is one of 5s, 10s, 15s, 30s, 1min, 5min, 10min

** Installed voices are available in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Speech\Voice\Tokens