December 2012 1 post

Disabling Win+Enter Narrator hotkey in Windows 8

Wednesday, December 19, 2012


I just picked up my Surface, and a huge annoyance is having Narrator (a screen reader) pop up every time I accidentally hit Win+Enter. (Ctrl+Enter sends mail in the mail app, and I often accidentally hit Win instead of Ctrl.)

The easiest solution I've found for disabling the hotkey is to disable the executable. You can do this by finding Narrator.exe in System32 and turning off the execute permission, or an even easier way is to create a registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\Narrator.exe

And in that key, create a String named Debugger with value %1.

Or merge this reg file. To re-enable Narrator, delete that registry key.

Tags: narrator, win8 | Posted at 12:01 | Comments (23)