Make Windows accessible

Computing is an activity suitable for people of all ages, whether at work or play; but as the years take their inevitable toll it may be that eyes get weaker, hands get shakier and it’s necessary to crank up the volume of the speakers in order to get the best out of Bruce Springsteen in concert on Youtube.

Most of us who have age-related ailments and minor physical complaints can carry on computing by tweaking a few settings in Windows XP and Vista and making careful decisions about the way we want to get things done. Here’s how.

There’s an amazing array of specialist input and output devices that help users with chronic physical and cognitive impairments to use computers (check out Microsoft’s list of assistive technology products). In this article we are going to concentrate on the enhancements within Windows that can help anybody who has a temporary physical infirmity or age-related condition to carry on computing by making a few minor tweaks.

How Windows can help
Windows helps people with visual problems by employing various techniques to make the screen easier to see and by turning a number of common visual cues into sound prompts. There’s also Windows Narrator, a synthetic voice that describes in words what is happening on the screen. People with hearing problems have the option to specify the use of screen prompts instead of audio cues and warnings.

There are several enhancements that make mice and keyboards easier to use, and people who find it impossible to use one or the other can configure Windows to be operated entirely by mouse or entirely by keyboard.

When neither mouse nor keyboard can be manipulated with ease there’s the option (but only in Windows Vista) of turning on speech recognition, which interprets instructions spoken into a headset microphone both as a means of operating Windows and as an alternative to typing text into applications such as word processors.

Speech recognition is not included with Windows XP but it can be bought from third-party software vendors ­ Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 costs about £80, comes with a headset and microphone and is available from Nuanceshop.

Turning on special features in Windows
Both Windows XP and Vista provide simple access to customisation features, albeit in slightly different ways. Windows Vista’s Ease of Access Center replaces XP’s Accessibility Wizard, providing all the same features from a single menu. There’s also an option to receive recommendations about making your computer easier to use, which launches a question-and-answer session that helps you to choose the best settings.

As the features are largely the same, we’ll use XP as an example of how to customise Windows to suit your needs. Click the Start menu, select All Programs followed by Accessories and then click Accessibility. Listed separately in this section are Windows Narrator (which reads items on the screen and in dialogue boxes aloud), Microsoft Magnifier (which magnifies areas of the screen for enhanced legibility) and On-Screen keyboard (a miniature keyboard that can be operated by mouse clicks). Alongside these is the Accessibility Wizard: a centralised means of changing numerous settings that would otherwise have to be hunted down in several locations.

The wizard starts by offering to provide larger text for the title bars of windows and menus, and optionally invokes Microsoft Magnifier. It then uses a set of interactive adjustments to help those with poor vision change the sizes of scroll bars, window borders and icons. Further options include switching to a high-contrast colour scheme, enlarging the mouse pointer, changing the width of the text cursor and making it blink faster or slower. For people with less than perfect hearing, the wizard switches on a tool called Sound Sentry, which provides visual warnings to accompany the standard Windows warning sounds.

Mouse and keyboard helpers
Those who have problems holding down several keys at once can choose to use a feature called Stickykeys, which enables users to press one key after the other instead of holding them all down at the same time. This also applies to actions such as holding down the Shift key to get capital letters. Bouncekeys is a related enhancement that ignores accidentally repeated keystrokes and is a help to anybody with shaking hands.