The Narrator reads Taskbar items and text in program titles or toolbars. It can read other text from some Windows programs. You can adjust the tone, speed and volume of the voice, and the narrator can be set to read aloud every character that you enter on the keyboard.

The main improvement in Vista's narrator is the voice itself. The female voice, Anna, is less irritating than the voice included with Wmdows XP, Sam. Anna's phrasing of sentences can still be odd, but she copes well with British phrases. When reading the text 'St George St', Anna will pronounce the words 'Saint' and 'street' correctly.
The narrator also has some new and useful keyboard shortcuts.

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Pressing the insert key and F4, F5, F6, F7 or F8 will prompt her to read a selection of the document. Selecting text in Notepad automatically gives it to Anna to read. Annoyingly, Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office 2007 are less smart. Although Anna can read the contents of menus, dialogue boxes and links, our efforts to get her to read text produced only 'empty line', 'empty paragraph' or 'empty document'.

We found it possible to get Anna to speak the contents of cells in Excel 2007, but reading a word document proved impossible. To do that you will need specialist software, although Anna will read out text in a Wordpad document.