How to make Vista easier to use for all

Narrative licence
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 Windows 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. 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.

Key issues
Another useful tool is the on-screen keyboard. This is much the same as the version found in Windows XP, and allows users to select letters with a mouse rather than a keyboard.

It also allows those who can’t use the mouse or keyboard to type using a single button ­ either the spacebar or the button on an external device, such as a joystick.

In this mode the keyboard first cycles between the rows of keys on the keyboard until the user presses the button once to select a row. Once a row is selected it cycles through each key in turn and, again, the user simply needs to push the button to choose the key they want.

Vista’s high-contrast mode can make the computer far easier to use for those with less-than-perfect eyesight. It uses the Classic design for Windows titles and toolbars rather than the posh but less clear Aero design, and displays white text on a black background, making it easy to read.

Vista also makes it simple to set up a keyboard shortcut that turns the high contrast mode on and off ­ from that point on, holding the Alt, Shift and Print Screen keys together switches immediately between the normal Windows display and the clearer high-contrast version.

Beneath the magnifier, narrator, on-screen keyboard and high-contrast mode you’ll find links to other useful information. This ranges from ‘Using the computer without a display’ to ‘Making it easier to focus on tasks’.

If you’re not sure where to start then there’s an entry for that, too. Clicking on ‘Get recommendations to make your computer easier to use’ takes you through a five-stage questionnaire covering eyesight, dexterity, hearing, speech and concentration.

Once this questionnaire has been completed Windows can suggest a set of options that should make the computer easy to use. You can accept its suggestions or make alterations before applying the new settings.

It’s worth exploring the individual items in the Ease of Access Center, as there is a lot here that can be useful. Most of the options aren’t new, but the Center brings them together in a way that makes them easy to try out.

It has long been possible to make all the fonts on the computer bigger or smaller, if you know where to look. The Ease of Access Center makes it easy, although you must restart the computer to save any changes.