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Control Panel - Ease of Access
Ease of Access Center - I'll be the first to admit
I'm very fortunate. As long as I have a pair of glasses
I can sit down at any computer and go to work. There are
many however that struggle to do what the majority take
for granted. I commend Microsoft for this section of
Control Panel. Spend a few minutes going through the
options and you'll likely be amazed how helpful some of
the options can be to folks suffering with vision,
hearing, and mobility restrictions.
Figure
01
Ease of
Access Center
- This is the main page of Access Center, a very good
jumping off point for all the available options. As good as
the majority of the tools are, I did find narrator to be
difficult to understand on quite a few occasions. There are
male and female voices available and they can be adjusted
over a fairly wide range to control speed, volume, and
pitch. Still, when narrator was reading the 'Quick Access to
Common Tools' section in the screen capture below, the word
SPACEBAR was pronounced 'Spack-Bur' using the default
settings.
Figure
02
There is a sub-link on the main [Ease of Access]
category or you can get to the same place by using [Get
Recommendations To Make Your Computer Easier To Use] on
the window shown above. It launches a five page
questionnaire related to eyesight, dexterity, hearing,
speech, and reasoning to help you make informed
decisions relative to which of the tools can best help
to improve the user experience.
Figure
08
Speech
Recognition Options
- Many years ago (and I do mean a lot of years) there were
conversations and predictions that within the very
foreseeable future, computers would be controlled by the
human voice and mice and keyboards would be virtually
obsolete. Those predictions still to this day surface on a
fairly regular basis, and while speech recognition has come
a long way from those early days, there is still a long way
to go before it is a viable replacement for other forms of
system/user interaction. Playing around with speech
recognition can be a lot of fun, but be prepared to spend a
lot of time training the system to understand your commands
and return the results you expect.
Figure
09
Figure
10
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