[tabi] Windows accessibility article
- From: "Chip Orange" <Corange@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <tabi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2010 16:25:15 -0400
The article below is from a main-stream computer e-magazine: Windows 7 News,
published by Sunbelt Software. at the end is a request for those who use
assistive technology to go on to their forums and tell them about it.
Making Windows 7 More Accessible
The first computer operating systems and software applications were designed by
and for people who had no physical disabilities, and consequently those who
were blind, had amputations or paralysis, suffered from neuromuscular diseases
or were otherwise disabled often had great difficulty using computers. The
software assumed that the user could see and react to what was on the screen,
type and use a mouse and, to a lesser extent, hear and react to sounds. For
millions of people, those assumptions don't apply.
The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) brought the plight of the
disabled to the attention of the business world. It prohibits discrimination
based on disability and, among other things, requires employers to provide
"reasonable accommodations" to qualified workers to help them do their jobs
with physical limitations. The Act also includes rules governing physical
access requirements for public entities and public transportation providers,
and commercial facilities open to the public, as well as requirements for
telecommunications providers. You can read more about the ADA here:
http://www.win7news.net/WTDFB4/100902-ada
<http://www.win7news.net/WTDFB4/100902-ada>
Over the two decades since its passage, the tech industry has begun to
recognize the needs of the disabled and both software and hardware makers have
stepped up efforts to provide accessibility features and devices that make it
easier for those with physical limitations to operate computers. Hardware
vendors make alternative input devices such as Braille keyboards and
notetakers, single handed keyboards, stick keyboards that can be operated with
the mouth or head, and even input devices that can be controlled by a foot, an
eyeblink, or breath. Check some of them out here:
http://www.win7news.net/WTDFB4/100902-gawds
<http://www.win7news.net/WTDFB4/100902-gawds>
Touch screens have become increasingly popular for portable devices such as
smart phones, tablets and laptops. There are also touch screen monitors
available for desktop systems, and some disabled persons, such as those with
Parkinson's or other diseases that impair motor skills, may find them easier to
operate than using a mouse or trackball. On the other hand, touch screens are
not user friendly to those with visual limitations, but there are overlays that
can be used to make them more accessible, and many of today's popular touch
devices allow you to enable speech output to assist visually impaired users.
http://www.win7news.net/WTDFB4/100902-uitrends
<http://www.win7news.net/WTDFB4/100902-uitrends>
Microsoft has been working on the accessibility problem for many years. Back in
1997, they created an initiative called Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA),
that defined a standard for Windows applications so they could communicate
important information to accessibility devices. The drawback was that the
software companies making the applications had to revise their applications to
make them accessible. What Microsoft does have control over is the operating
system, and they have been building more accessibility features into each new
version of the OS since 1992, when the company created the first full-time
staff position dedicated to accessibility issues. The Access Pack for Windows
added accessibility features to Windows 3.x. These included many of the
features that we still see in Windows today, such as StickyKeys, MouseKeys and
ToggleKeys.
http://www.win7news.net/WTDFB4/100902-mssupport
<http://www.win7news.net/WTDFB4/100902-mssupport>
Over the years, Microsoft has received a number of awards from various
organizations for their commitment to accessibility, and they have awarded
grants to expand technology access to people with disabilities. You can read a
history of Microsoft's activities in the accessibility area, from 1988 to the
present, here:
http://www.win7news.net/WTDFB4/100902-mshistory
<http://www.win7news.net/WTDFB4/100902-mshistory>
Windows 7 and Office 2010 both include improvements to the accessibility
features, as well as carrying forward features that have been in Windows for a
long time. Let's take a look at some of ways Windows 7 can be made more
accessible.
The Ease of Access Center gathers the accessibility settings in one centralized
location. You access it via Control Panel or the keyboard shortcut WIN + U. The
Magnifier and Narrator, along with the On-screen Keyboard and High Contrast
settings, are at the top of the main pane and easy to get to. The audio (text
to speech) feature is automatically turned on for this screen, so that it will
read the main options to you as soon as you open it. You can configure, with
the provided checkboxes, whether you want this section read aloud every time.
For those who can't see (or can't read), the Narrator can be turned on manually
or configured to run whenever you log onto Windows. It reads the screen text
aloud and describes what's happening when error messages appear. Narrator is a
pretty basic text reader. There are third party screen readers that can work
better for certain purposes, but some are expensive. JAWS (Job Access With
Speech) is one of the most popular, but the standard version costs $895.
NaturalReader (which can also convert written text documents to MP3 or WAV
files for your portable player), is more affordable, at $99.50 for the
professional version. If you'll need a reader for all of your computing
activity, you'll probably want to buy a commercial product. However, the built
in Narrator can get the job done when visually limited folks need to use a
public computer or a friend's computer that doesn't have the third party
software installed. Windows 7 also includes the Audio Description feature that
can d
escribe what's going on in videos (when a description has been included in the
video file).
Here's an interesting article on how the blind experience the Internet:
http://www.win7news.net/WTDFB4/100902-gizmodo
<http://www.win7news.net/WTDFB4/100902-gizmodo>
With the baby boomer generation aging, we now have a large number of computer
users who can see, but cannot see well. Older eyes may need some magnification
to read text and see fine detail on the screen. The Magnifier has been improved
in Windows 7, making navigation faster. It now includes both a lens mode and a
full screen mode in addition to the docked mode; I prefer the full screen mode.
You can also change the lens size if you're using lens mode. Note that you can
use only docked mode if you don't have Aero.
You can configure the Magnifier to follow the mouse pointer, the keyboard focus
or the text insertion point and set how much the view changes when zooming in
or out. If you need more help seeing the display, you can turn on color
inversion in the Magnifier, which will change a white page with black text into
a black screen with white text, or vice versa. This can be especially helpful
with web pages that use a dark background and light text. I've heard many
people complain about such pages, and most didn't know that they could use this
Magnifier option to make them more readable.
You can also permanently set a high contrast display, make the text and icons
permanently bigger, turn off animations and adjust the transparency settings,
to make things easier to see. In some cases, Windows can even remove background
images. Check out the "Make the computer easier to see" section in the
accessibility options and play around with the settings.
Another new feature in Windows 7 is the ability to resize the onscreen keyboard
to make it easier to see, by simply dragging the same way you resize windows.
The onscreen keyboard also includes the text prediction feature. When you type
a few letters, you'll see several suggestions at the top of the keyboard for
the most common words that begin with those letters, and you can select the
right word with just one click instead of having to type out the rest of the
letters.
If you can't type at all, you can use the voice command and dictation features
to control the computer and input text with your voice. Speech recognition in
Windows 7 still isn't perfect, but it is better than in previous versions of
Windows, and requires less training time. You might also want to change the
color and size of the mouse pointer to make it easier to see. Now you can do
that within the Ease of Access Center, instead of having to hunt down that
option in the mouse's Properties.
If you can't hear, you can set Windows to display a visual warning instead of a
sound notification. You can choose to flash the active caption bar, flash the
active window, or flash the entire desktop, and you can turn on text captions
for spoken dialog in instances where that's available.
All this is in addition to the old familiar StickyKeys (which allows you press
key combinations one key at a time), ToggleKeys (which sounds a tone to alert
you if you accidentally press CAPS LOCK, NUM LOCK or SCROLL LOCK keys),
FilterKeys (which tells Windows to ignore or slow down brief or repeated
keystrokes, and MouseKeys (which lets you use the numeric keypad to move the
mouse pointer around the screen).
Finally, for those who have learning disabilities such as dyslexia or attention
deficit disorder, Microsoft has published a Guide to help you reduce visual and
auditory distractions and use assistive technology to make it easier to use the
computer. You can find it here:
http://www.win7news.net/WTDFB4/100902-learningguides
<http://www.win7news.net/WTDFB4/100902-learningguides>
Tell us what you think. Do you use the accessibility features in Windows, or do
you know someone who does? How well do they work for you? What would you change
or add? How about third party assistive software and hardware devices? Which
have you found to be most - and least - helpful? Should Microsoft continue to
add accessibility features to Windows, or do you consider this "bloatware" that
should be a separate, optional add-on? Let us know your opinions and
experiences by participating in our forum at
http://www.win7news.net/WTDFB4/100902-win7forum
<http://www.win7news.net/WTDFB4/100902-win7forum>
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- » [tabi] Windows accessibility article - Chip Orange
