LAURA PALMARO: Hi, I’m Laura and I’m on the Chrome accessibility
team at Google.
In this quick tutorial, we’ll go over some basic browsing techniques, and we’ll take
a look at a few different ways to open and navigate tabs and links using just your Chromebook
keyboard.You may already be familiar with how to browse and navigate a web page just
using the arrow keys.
But, did you know you can actually navigate and scroll down whole sections of a long page
just by pressing the Spacebar?
Let’s take a look.
When I get to the end of the page, I can go back up by holding down Shift this time, while
I press the Spacebar.
You can also do this same thing using the Alt keys with the Up and Down arrows.
If I’m at the top of the page, and just want to jump straight to the bottom, I can
press Control + Alt + Down arrow.
Or, press Control + Alt + Up arrow to get back to the top.
When on lengthy pages, this can be a lot faster than using just the arrow keys!
To move around the page, jumping from one clickable thing to another, press Tab.
And to move backwards by links, buttons, and anything else that’s focusable and clickable,
I can press Shift + Tab.
Now you probably already know that when your Chrome browser is open, there’s at least
one open tab on your Chromebook.
So are you ready to explore additional tabs?
I want to open a new tab, so I‘ll hold down Control and press T. Okay...Next, let’s
close that tab by pressing Control + W. Now I’m going to re-open that last tab.
To do that - remember how I opened up the new tab?
Control + T?
Can you guess how I’m going to reopen it?
If you guessed Control + Shift + T, awesome!
I actually wind up using this all the time when I accidentally close a tab that I still
need open.
Now that I have more than one tab open, I can hold down Control and press Tab to cycle
through them.
And to go backwards...
Control + Shift + Tab.
One last thing.
Let’s open up a new window instead of a new tab.
Press Control + N (as in New) to do that.
To move between windows, I can press Alt + Tab, or Alt + Shift + Tab to cycle backwards.
As long as we’re talking about tabs, let’s also talk about links.
Now these are related because you can open up links in your existing tab, a new tab,
or a completely new window.
And Chrome has lots of different ways to open your links using just the keyboard.
You can open a link in the current tab, or a new tab in the background.
You can also open a link in the new tab and then jump to that tab in one step.
You can even open a link in a completely new window.
Let’s explore those now.
So, here’s how to open a link in the current tab.
Just press Enter.
To open a link in a new background tab, hold down Control and press Enter.
Now we’re going to open a link in a new tab and jump directly to that tab.
I hold down Control and Shift, and press Enter, and there we go!
But if I need to open a link in a completely new browser window, I can hold down Alt and
Shift, and then press Enter to do that.
So that’s quite a few ways, right?
Did you see a new favorite?
Don’t worry if you don’t remember all of these right away.
You can always rewatch this video, or visit the Chromebook Help Center to pull up articles
on keyboard shortcuts.
And you can also watch other videos on navigating Chromebooks by keyboard, so you can get
the most out of your Chromebook.
Again, I’m Laura, and on behalf of myself and the Chrome Accessibility Team, thanks
for watching!