It’s time to write a post about my impressions of Accessibility in Windows 11. In many ways its just a slight change and progression from Ease of Access in Windows 10. In short Accessibility is the biggest change in it’s name. I said in previous posts that the lack of backward chaining that is easy to install was going to be a major drawback to it’s wide use. Hence why I bought a new device cheaply as a chromebook. I didn’t buy the cheapest but a reasonable amount of memory and so far I have been happy with it’s performance.
Accessibility is sub-divided into Vision, Hearing and Interaction. Usual things such as changes of text size and mouse pointers are there along with scaling and night view. Much of this owes it’s roots to apple. Even the interface reminds me of an apple machine.
The only really new things are the voice access – which allows control of the device more comprehensively than just speech recognition. Using “What can I say?” gives you a list of commands very similar to Dragon . Interesting as Microsoft have recently purchased Nuance the makers of Dragon. I am currently looking into this and will report back in future posts.
Narrator is similar to what it was in Windows 10 but it is more comprehensive and easier to use as a text to speech. Again this needs a thorough review which is not the scope of this post. One feature I like is being able to have the typing keys spoken which useful for the blind and partially sighted as well as dyslexics.
Subtitles have a few options that make the text larger and colour contrast such as yellow on blue background. Other options can be tried to see if it suits the person needs better.
In conclusion
There are more settings to change and customise Windows 11 accessibility. Voice Access is more like Dragon than previous Microsoft speech. I think Accessibility in Windows 11 is an improvement and definitely worth accessing when you get a Windows 11 machine.
AccessAbility Solutions 