Notion

Notion builds every page out of blocks. A paragraph, a heading, a to-do and a table are all separate objects you can move around. That flexibility is why teams like it, and it is also why it is one of the harder tools on this list to drive with speech.

We would rather say that up front than sell you a course. If your team has standardised on Notion, the techniques below make it workable. If you are choosing for yourself and you use a screen reader all day, a plain document in Word will cost you far less effort for the same result.

• Read by heading. Arrowing through a page block by block is slow. Building pages with real headings, and navigating by them, is the difference between usable and exhausting.
• Learn quick find. Control plus P on Windows, or Command plus P on a Mac, jumps straight to any page by name. Far faster than working down the sidebar tree.
• The slash command saves you the toolbar. Typing a forward slash followed by the block name inserts it directly, so you never have to go looking for a button.
• Prefer table and list views over boards. A kanban board is a visual arrangement with very little underlying structure. The same database shown as a table reads in a sensible order.
• Expand toggles before you read. Collapsed content is genuinely not there as far as your screen reader is concerned.
• Export when you need to read properly. Exporting a page to Word or Markdown gives you a clean document in a tool you control. For long reading, that is often the quickest route of all.

• The sidebar goes on forever. Pages nested several levels deep are painful to walk through. Use quick find and favourites instead of navigating the tree.
• A database reads as a wall of cells. Switch the view, hide the columns you do not need and give it a sensible sort order. You can save that as your own view without changing anyone else's.
• Comments are easy to miss. They sit alongside a block rather than in the flow of the text. Check the notifications area rather than expecting to meet them while reading.
• A page seems empty. Notion loads content as you arrive. Give it a second before concluding something is broken.

Teams who have already chosen Notion and need a disabled colleague included in it properly. If that is your situation, an hour spent on structure, meaning headings, view types and page naming, makes more difference than any individual keyboard trick.