Chapter 6: Applying Place Markers
Web Browsing with Mozilla Firefox

 Chapter List

New in Version 21.0!

As previous chapters highlighted, you can skip to particular sections of a webpage by using the Dolphin Cursor Quick Navigation Keys. With the release of version 21.0, SuperNova and Dolphin ScreenReader now also enables you to mark your own points on a webpage to which you can easily navigate to at a future date. These are called Place Markers.

You may find Place Markers a particularly useful productivity tool when you want to jump directly to useful points on a webpage, such as marking your stopping point in a partly reviewed news article.

Place Markers can be defined as permanent or temporary and can be anchored to text or elements on the current webpage.

Temporary Place Marker

A temporary Place Marker is one that remains active only for the time you are on the webpage. Once you open a new webpage, the temporary marker is lost. You may want to use this type of Place Marker if you are visiting a webpage that you are unlikely to revisit again in the future or are dealing with a website whose design and layout is regularly updated.

To set a temporary Place Marker:

  1. Navigate the Dolphin Cursor to the place on the webpage you want to set the temporary marker.
  2. Press LEFT CONTROL + CAPS LOCK + A.

You can set only one temporary Place Marker on a webpage. However, you can reposition the temporary marker at any time by moving the Dolphin Cursor to the new position and pressing LEFT CONTROL + CAPS LOCK + A again.

Tip: You can also use a temporary Place Marker to mark the beginning of a selection. To do this, set your temporary Place Marker at the start of the passage you want to select, move the Dolphin cursor to the end of the text and press CONTROL + C to copy the text to the Windows Clipboard. The text will be copied in plain text format and will respect the line breaks detected by the Dolphin cursor.

Permanent Place Markers

A permanent Place Marker is one that is saved and remains active each time you return to the webpage. This type of Place Marker is helpful if you are going to a webpage that you regularly revisit and whose structure is constant. An example could be a homepage that shows the headlines for national news, local news, sports news, entertainment news and weather forecasts. Such a webpage may require you to navigate through multiple Headings before you can reach your desired section. With the use of Place Markers, you can mark the section or sections you want to visit on the webpage and then be able to navigate directly to those sections.

To set a permanent Place Marker:

  1. Navigate the Dolphin Cursor to the place on the webpage you want to set the permanent marker.
  2. Press LEFT CONTROL + LEFT SHIFT + A. The "Add Place Marker" dialog box will appear with the focus in the "Place Marker Name" edit area. By default, the edit area contains the text that's at the current Dolphin Cursor location on the webpage. 
    Image of the Add bookmark dialog box showing Home as the text to be marked.
  3. If you want to give the marker a more meaningful name, type a new name in this field.
  4. Choose a "Match Place Marker" value. You can set your match to the "Exact position in webpage" or "Text and relative position in webpage". The exact position applies strict rules based on its absolute position on the webpage. The relative position allows for some flexibility as the marker’s position is based on the text and surrounding tags. The relative position is the default setting and is also recommended when wishing to apply a marker to a website domain.
  5. Choose a "Place Marker scope" value. You can set the marker to apply only to the current URL or the current website domain. You may wish to set the value to the website domain if you want to apply the marker to multiple pages across the website, for example, a link situated in the footer section of a website.
  6. Choose the "OK" button.

You can add multiple permanent Place Markers on a webpage. You can also edit, delete, import and export your permanent Place Markers from the "Web Settings" dialog box in the SuperNova and Dolphin ScreenReader Control Panel. Importing and exporting such files enable you to share your own setup with others who may be struggling to navigate complex webpages.

Navigating to Place Markers

You can navigate to the next Place Marker on a webpage by pressing A and go to the previous Place Marker by pressing SHIFT + A. The speech will say "Place Marker not found" if there is no Place Marker found in the direction you are navigating.

You can also use the Item Finder to list all the Place Markers on the current webpage and route the Dolphin Cursor directly to any of them. You can open the Item Finder by pressing CAPS LOCK + TAB.

Note: Place Markers you create in Mozilla Firefox are not supported in Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge and vice versa. This is due to the way Firefox renders its webpages. Place Markers specifically created using Firefox will report Firefox as a tag in the SuperNova and Dolphin ScreenReader "Web Settings" dialog box.