Microsoft OneNote is accessible. Here are a few tips that make a better accessibility experience. These were posted by the administrator of Non-visualdevelopment.org a website containing resources for visually impaired programmers on the program-l mailing list and are being posted with his permission.

These instructions relate to Jaws for Windows

1. Press Insert + 6 on the top row of your keyboard to make a new JCF file for OneNote.
2. Turn off control type in the verbosity options for the particular verbosity profile you are using.
3. Also turn off Control Name.
4. turn off selected because it minimizes the blabber when jumping from paragraph to paragraph.

Be aware now that when you select windows that you won’t hear what they are, so maybe you would want to only turn off control name when you are doing a lot of editing, then turn it back on when you want to do a lot of moving around in the ribbon and menus.

What this does in OneNote documents is keep the lines you read from speaking twice.

If you are really industrious, you could make a little script that goes in and toggles control name on and off, but I haven’t done that yet.

5. Go into OneNote and press Alt, then F, then T, and arrow down to Options if necessary.
6. make sure all windows are docked instead of floating.
7. minimize the navigation pane.
8. turn off the floating “new page” button next to the pages pane.
9. Close Options by pressing OK.
10. Go to the View ribbon by pressing Alt and press Enter on the View choice.
11. Make sure zoom level is set to 100%.
12. Return to the your OneNote document.
13. Select some text.
14. Move the JAWS cursor to that text.
15. Press Insert + F2 and tell JAWS to use those colors as selected text.

Now text selection should speak properly.