Blogging to the song mine by Taylor Swift.
As a blind person, I love many things. Just a few of them are the right to stare and grin at puppies. Another thing is what happens with me and my boyfriend goes shadily into the bedroom, and then the screen fades to black. I love it when people in the computer industries use accessible mean, modes, and told, and make them prominent in any way possible. Even though Microsoft isn't my favorite company by any means, I still use windows, and until my boyfriend and I can afford it, I won’t be switching over to a Mac at all anytime soon. I would, however, like to point out that Microsoft, after over 10 years in the computer business, is finally taking people with disabilities into consideration.
Someday, I don't know the day; a Windows 8 developer download was released by Microsoft. Download the link here. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ at the time of this writing, I haven’t quite installed it. I'm in the process of installing it on a new windows partition. What do I think about the accessibility of the new operating system, however? Well, obviously they won’t be as accessible as apple and voiceover, but the times are changing for bill gates and his world domination. Below are just a few examples of accessibility improvements in windows 8.
Voice recognition. It seems that the speech recognition in windows 8 is there, but I couldn't test it seeing as how I have not given windows 8 a test run yet.
Deaf accessibility solutions. Really, the deaf don't need these, accept for closed captions, but there are a few extra tweaks inn there that can make the experience better in some instances for people with hearing impairments. In the new and shiny looking ease of access center, there’s an option to extend the flashing of the screen when your computer makes a sound. This was just in a blog post. As I have said, I didn't test this out for myself yet. My boyfriend is downloading the iso image now.
Accessibility options during setup: when Windows 8 launches for the first time and prompts you for the name of the computer and other personal settings, an accessibility icon in the bottom-left corner. Opening this icon provides a list of all the major accessibility features and the option to turn them on. The instructions are also read out by Narrator. This is a great help as in Windows 7 it was difficult to complete the setup process as most features couldn’t be enabled until the setup process was completed and the Windows desktop appeared.
New windows magnifier! One reason I hated windows so badly was the fact that you couldn't use the windows magnifier for doing anything at all. When the new, and supposedly improved, windows 7 launched, the hype was all about the new windows magnifier. I also use something that is called high contrast that inverts everything. Basically the screen is black with white words on it. I use this so I don't have to make my good eye milk like a cow. I use this all the time. In previous windows versions, this conflicted with windows magnifier and you couldn't use the full screen magnifier. One of the biggest complaints of Windows 7 was that you could use the full-screen magnifier, but changing to the high contrast theme would change it to the old ‘strip’ magnifier that is used in windows XP and Vista. This has been rectified in Windows 8 and now both Magnifier and the high contrast themes can be used together. The magnifier itself also appears to have a few different modes and a tweak so it will be interesting to see how this evolves as the development process continues.
A screen reader right out of the box! In a previous post by me I talk about narrator in depth. Narrator has finally received a major update, the first since it appeared in Windows 2000 some 11 years ago. To date it seems to have a lot more commands, but it’s important to stress that it is still not an adequate screen reader in its own right at this stage of the development. Hopefully work on Narrator will continue so that Windows can finally have some reasonable functionality for people who are blind or vision impaired out of the box.
New accessibility choices for login and desktop: arguably one of the best improvements in Windows 8, the Ease of Access Center now features a ‘Change logon settings’ option. This screen provides a list of all the major accessibility features in Windows 8 with the option to turn them on at the login screen, turn them on at the desktop, or both. This can also apply to multiple assistive technologies, such as the On-Screen Keyboard and Sticky Keys.
These are just some of the new accessibility features I have heard about, watched, looked at, or read about on the internet after looking it up online. I still don't think Microsoft new accessibility tackle will ever compare to apples, but I could be wrong. Maybe Microsoft has finally realized that the reason Mac got such a big following is because of its accessibility appeal to people with disabilities.
I'll be Frank. I can't wait to test drive this new version of windows. Apparently it's supposed to be lighter on resources amongst other things. I would, however, advise you on what laptops you use it on. If you install it over an old partition, some important drivers may have some problems installing.
So what does this mean for Microsoft and the blind community? Who knows, but this is the best push forward to making usable computers that I have ever seen. In fact, it makes me wonder why didn't they just do this from the get go?
Well all, I'm out. If you want to follow me on twitter, my screen name is @theblindwriter. My boyfriend is also on twitter. @shamation. Please don't ask him what I eat for breakfast. That's just odd. Subscribe to me if you wish. I'll be Blogging more about windows 8 when I get my boyfriend to make me a new CD for me. Cheers all, and have fun anticipating the first compotation apple has ever had in years!
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