This meeting is being recorded Okay, so I'm going to demonstrate some of the
accessibility features built into Windows 10 and 11 that can be used to help people
that have got vision impairments, okay, and these include magnification and speech
and bits and bobs of other things as well. What I want to do, though, is first of all see
if anybody here is aware of magnification and speech that isn't based on Windows. So, for
example, there are third-party applications, these are ones that you bu
y from vendors such
as Sight and Sound and Dolphin and elsewhere on the market but these are all quite costly
solutions, you know. They're for between three hundred and a thousand pounds depending
on what solution you go for and a lot of people just can't afford that sort of cost. So
these ones are all built in and, to be honest, they're getting better as time goes by. Three
or four years ago they were pretty pants, okay, that's just my description ...pants....
but now they're actually qui
te, quite good. So, let's have a look shall we?
So can you all hear my sound? I'm just going to go through this bit
here...... Can people hear that? "Yeah" Jana? "Yep, I can hear that" So it's all coming
through. So I'm going to start with the vision aspects first and then move on to the screen
reader aspects second. So from the desktop, it's fairly nicely laid out on my machine here;
it's just a plain screen with icons down the left but the icons are quite small okay. So there
are some fe
atures that we can take advantage of here to make those icons a little bit bigger.
So I'm going to just put my mouse pointer in a blank area on the desktop and I'm going to press
the right mouse button and a menu will pop up. And Jaws, which is what I'm
using as my screen reader, reads out the first option here which is view.
I'm just going to slow Jaws down a little bit. And in here I can choose to arrange my icons
and other items on the desktop in a certain way, but the option that I'm lo
oking for here is
View and this is the top option. "View sub menu V" And I'm going to open this menu up. "Large
icons" So I'm using the keyboard to do this and I just press the right arrow key on view, and
I've got some options here for large icons, medium icons, and small icons. Now quite why
you'd want small icons even as a sighted person, I don't really know but the option is there.
Let's change this to large icons. Have a look at my icons as it stands..... they're not
bad ,but they're
not very big. I'm going to change it to larger icons. "Large icons"
So the icons have got larger, however, the text underneath them isn't really much
larger. It's a bit larger, but not much. So you can just use this option here. I'll do
that again; the right mouse , go to view, open the menu up and I'm going to put it back on
medium icon which is what it was on to start with. So that's not particularly helpful in the sense
that you can't go any bigger than the large icons option. However, t
here is a way you can make
things bigger and some people may know this and some may not. So, if I put my mouse pointer
in the blank part of the screen and I hold down the control key on the keyboard and then, with the
wheel on the mouse, I push the wheel away from me, this is what's called zooming in and I can
make the icons bigger as follows..... see this? I'm going to make the icons really big.
How's that? Is that all shown on your screen? Has that shown up on your screen? "Yes" "Yeah"
O
kay. So you could you could use this method and this is probably for somebody that's got
reasonable vision but just needs things a bit bigger to just see it more clearly and I
find this quite nice. Now this zoom feature, you can use it in all sorts of places and I'll
just demonstrate one or two other places in a second where we can use this. "Gary, can I just
say something? The writing is quite small isn't it?" The writing is quite small? "Yeah"
Yes, there's another way of getting around th
at which I'll demonstrate just a bit later.
"Sorry, okay" That's okay! That's a good point! But some people don't really go by the writing,
they go by what the picture is or the colour of it, that sort of thing but you're quite right,
the writing, or the text as we should call it, doesn't get any larger, or not significantly
larger. So I'm just going to reduce this back down using the control key and the
mouse to something a bit smaller that I'm happy with. So I'm going to leave it on that
measurement there. Now, I can use this feature, this zoom feature inside documents, web pages
and email messages. I'm going to open up a web, sorry a document, this it called Louis Braille.
It's about Louis Braille, believe it or not! Let me just give it a second or three to start up. Here it goes... Well this machine's slow, isn't it? So I already
got the Word logo on the screen but no document as yet. "You've got a lot running on your machine,
Gary, so it's bound to take a while" I've got
a new machine, Jonathan, coming. It's not
been quite built yet. It's a Windows 11 one with loads of RAM and loads of memory in it.
And that'll be much faster than this. Okay, so I have a document on the screen here and it's
........does anyone have Microsoft word here? Chris, have you got Microsoft Word?
"Do I use Microsoft Word? Yes, yes, yeah" And I know Jonathan has.
Jana, you teach Microsoft Word, don't you? Or you work with Microsoft Word? "Yeah"
Madeleine, do you have Microsoft Word
? "Yes, I do. I have Windows 10." Windows 10 and
Microsoft Word. You have Microsoft Word? "Yes" Now, this feature I'm going to show you here
isn't a Windows accessibility feature, it's a Word accessibility feature and it's whereby the
document on the screen at the moment is displayed in what's called wysiwyg. Wysiwyg is; what you
see is what you get. So it's displayed how it will print out. So what it looks like on the screen now
is what it will look like when it's printed out, but there is
a problem with that, potentially,
for someone that's got low vision. It's that you see the margins around the side of the page
and in order to get all the text in it has to be a bit smaller. So this is what's called print
layout mode on Window, on Word, sorry. Print layout mode. And there is a way you can make make
it easier to see by putting it into what's called draft layout mode. I'm just going to change
it let's see what the difference is. So this this mode takes away the margins and,
therefore,
allows more space for the text to be spread out across the screen. So here's the previous one
........ and here's the the current one...... So which is better? "The second one" Yeah, I think
the same, Chris. I don't care what it looks like before it's printed out, personally. I want to be
able to see it whilst I'm whilst I'm creating it. So this is a bit better. However, going back
to the zoom option that I mentioned before, I'm going to try and find my mouse..... I can
never se
e this mouse ..... if I put the mouse pointer in the middle of the text, anywhere
in the text, hold down my control key as I did on the desktop and use the wheel
away from me the text will get larger. So it should be getting larger. Can
you confirm that? "Yes it is" Yep, and you can actually zoom in to quite an enormous
size if you want to on this text. However, if you go too large it will go off the edge
of the screen and then that can make it a bit difficult to read it. So I'm just going
to pop
that back down into a bit more of a nice size. So that's just a Word feature. This particular
option here where I'm switching between that way of seeing the documents is only available in
Microsoft Word, you can't just do that in any sort of application. And just out of interest, I'm
using control, alt and P to switch to this method and control, alt and N, as in November, to switch
to this method. So those two keystrokes could help for people that are working with students in
school
it might help them a little bit to see their documentation a bit easier. Now what if I
wanted to change the colours? Windows comes with a few different colour schemes that are available
and there is a keyboard method that you can do to change the colour. And I'm going to press
that here..... the keyboard command is shift, alt and print screen. Now, the print screen key,
if you're using a standard windows keyboard with 105 keys on it, the standard one, the print
screen key is to the right o
f F12. So I'm going to hold down shift, alt and press print
screen and I will receive a message on screen. At least I should do! 'High contrast. yes button' And it says do you
want to use high contrast and I'm positioned on the yes button so I'm just going to press my enter
key here. 'Enter' And the colours will change to high contrast. Give it a few seconds, it takes a
little while to do. And there we go. So I've now got black background with white text. Quite high
contrast white text. I c
an choose to have yellow text and green text or any other text I like but
the three that it gives you by default are yellow, white and green text on a black background.
Now, should I want to change my colours, I can go into the high contrast section and
customize this. So I'm just going to go into high contrast and I'm going to press the
Windows key to display the start menu...... ......and I'm going to type in high contrast.
And when I type something into the search box, a set of results ar
e displayed based on what
I typed into the search box. So I typed in high contrast so the first option is change
high contrast theme. I'm going to choose this option here. I'm now in settings and I'm
in the high contrast section of settings. So in here I have a button at the top
of the screen for turning high contrast on or off and just beneath that I've got
some options for different colour schemes. So I've got high contrast black.
I'm just going to open the box up here. I've got high con
trast black, high
contrast white, high contrast number two. If I do number two .......'enter, high
contrast number two, high contrast theme combo box high contrast number two'
and that's changed the text, I believe, to yellow as opposed to white. "It's changed
it to green" Okay so green, it's changed the colour though isn't it? "Yes" I think there's
a yellow one though, let me just find it....... 'High contrast number one' Okay, so you've
got high contrast number one which is yellow, high
contrast number two which is green and
high contrast black, I believe, is the white. So there's three different options there. Now it
is possible in here, in this particular screen, to customize the background and the foreground
colours and the colours of links and all those sort of things, but really that's not very easy
because what it does, it brings up what's called a palette like a rainbow and you have to sort
of move the mouse pointer onto certain parts of the rainbow and click it, an
d it's not that
easy for someone with vision impairments to do that. So I think the best thing is here just to
choose from one of these default options and, personally, I think the black and white option
is very good, certainly for people that have got RP and glaucoma who might suffer from glare.
This is quite relaxing on the eyes as opposed to the white background and black text. So I'm
just going to come out of here briefly.... ....back to my document.... and so let's have a
look at the
difference. So this is one option, I'm just going to turn high contrast
off...look how glary that can be for someone with a fairly severe eye condition.
That can be quite hurtful on the eyes. I know a lot of people that have got certain eye
conditions and they find it really difficult to look at that colour for more than a few
minutes before they have to move away and come back later. So I'm going to put it
back on the dark colour scheme ........ Anybody got any questions at this moment in
time? So we're just looking at the
visual aspects at the moment..... No? Good, okay. I'm going to go back to my desktop
and I'm going to have a look at the mouse pointer itself. Now this may not work when I demonstrate
it because, in previous times I've done this with people, I go to change my mouse pointer colour
and the size but it doesn't reflect when you're sharing the screen. Let's hope that things have
changed and it does reflect on your screen, but I have my doubts! So my mouse point
er
is actually quite large. I've increased the size of this mouse pointer from the normal
size to like a middling size okay. And the colour... I'm just going to take this black and
white off.... the colour of my mouse is yellow. Can you confirm that, Madeleine or Jana? "Errm, so right now you've just got a small white
mouse pointer" "I can't see the mouse, where's the mouse?" It's right
in the centre of the scree, Jana "I can see it, but it's very tiny
and it's just white right now" I'm ju
st gonna put it back on the black
and white, Jana, so you can see it. At least, hopefully, you can see.
It's right in the centre here. Okay , so I'm just going to go through the motions
of changing the mouse pointer colour and the size. If it works great, if it doesn't you'll know
where to go to do it, okay. So to change the mouse pointer colour and size I'm going to open
the start menu again............................. And I'm going to type the word mouse. And when I do that it searches f
or anything
that's got the word mouse included in its name and the top option is change mouse pointer
size. That is actually the one I want, so I'm going to press enter on this one.
And it brings up the settings for my mouse. Okay and can you see the screen here? There's a
slider bar at the top of the screen, or towards top of the screen, which goes from left to right
and this is for increasing the size of the mouse. I'm going to make it smaller....so I've gone down
to one. There are 11 va
lues here and I can choose from one to eleven. And I'm going to go to the
right and each time I move to the right my mouse pointer increases in size. And this is the bit I
don't think will work. Can you see this happening, anybody? 'seven, eight, nine' So my mouse pointer
now, on my machine, is very large and I'm going to go a bit larger...... 'twelve, thirteen'. So
there's more than 11 options there's fifteen. 'fourteen, fifteen' So this is as big as it
goes. That's very large that mouse p
ointer. "For me it's the same size" Yeah, I didn't think
it would work, I didn't think it would work, however ........"it's a bit bigger" Yeah, but I
don't think it's coming across quite ....."I don't think it's 15 though, I don't think it's that
big" Well, 15 doesn't mean it's 15 times larger, it just means it's the 15th option on the
scale. It's approximately.... I'll have a little guess here..... it's approximately six to
seven times larger than the normal mouse pointer size "It is bigge
r" It's bigger, yeah, but it's
not showing up correctly because of the screen share unfortunately. But you can go through this.
This is where you come to make the differences. If I come down the screen a bit further .........
............and I've got a change pointer color option here. Currently it's on white but if
I go to the option called custom .......... ....... I can then choose from these colours:
lime, yellow, gold, pink, turquoise, green, purple I'm gonna put it on green. I'll press
the
enter key.....so it's changed to.... on my screen it hasn't changed at all which
is great!! I'll put it on pink. Yes, it has changed now on my screen. Is anyone
picking that up on theirs? It's gone to pink. Can you see that, Madeleine? "Err...it still
looks the same right now" Yeah, it will be unfortunately. :-( So believe me, this mouse
pointer at the moment is extremely large and it's pink in colour. I'm just going to put the size of
the mouse back down. I'm going to put it on five.
"It's still white the mouse at the moment" Yes, it
will be. It's to do with the screen share between Zoom and windows. I think the graphics are taken
over really by Zoom and it doesn't always reflect what's happening in Windows. But this is the only
feature that won't work properly, I can assure you. "But we can do it on our own though?" You
can. You can do it on your own and I will send out some documentation about Windows accessibility
features afterwards. So the techniques and the instr
uctions are all included in the
documentation. So I'm going to exit out of here. I'll go back to my desktop .......and my mouse is
now pink as opposed to yellow what it was before and it's back down to the number five, that's
the size I prefer to have it on. Now, all these features at the minute, you know this one where
I can change the icon size on the desktop, as someone previously pointed out, it doesn't change
the text size does it? So whilst it's useful, to a degree, it's not necessari
ly the solution.
Windows comes with a magnifier built into it and it's actually quite a good magnifier, to be honest
with you. It's comparable with things like zoom text and Supernova, but not .... "and MBDA" This
is the magnifier, Jonathan, the magnifier. So the magnifier is comparable with Supernova and zoom
text but not quite as good, okay, So I'm going to turn it on. I'm going to hold down my windows
key that's the key that's to the right of the control key on a standard keyboard and it
's got
a logo of Microsoft...Microsoft's logo printed on it's a bit like a flag.... I'm going to hold that
down and press the plus key on my numeric keypad. And when I do that the magnifier is turned on
and then if I keep pressing Windows +, I can magnify this list. I'll go back to the icons in a
second they've disappeared. Let's go back to the icons now. So now the writing on the screen
is larger. But then again, so is everything. So this way I need to move my mouse
around to see what's o
n the screen. And for some people using magnification can
be a little disorientating. I know for me, it is, so I'm going to make that just
a tiny bit smaller. But the benefit of having magnification on.... if I now open up
that menu again that I opened up previously for changing to large icons ....that
menu is now larger. Look at that menu So these are nice easy to see and I can
turn the magnification off at the press of a switch. If I hold down the
windows key and press Escape it goes off
. If I hold down the windows key
and press plus again it comes back on. There we go, back on. There are some quite nice features built
in to magnifier whereby I can actually read text with the magnifier. It's got a
text reading option built into it. Let's see if I can remember what it is. I'm going to
go back to Louis Braille if he's still there. 'Word. No open document'
I'll just get the document up I'm just getting a bit of delay here
Just opening up Louis Braille again So here we are ...b
ack in Word. I've got it in
that print layout mode here where I can see the margins down the left and right. I'm going to put
it into draft layout, okay and this is much better for me to read now. Chris, this something that you
would take advantage of, I'm sure. "Absolutely, I didn't know about draft view, I must
admit" So just here I can go extremely large and I can go back down to kind of normal
size. This is a typical sort of size there and I'm just pressing Windows plus repeatedly
and
it changes the size. Now by default, by default with magnifier, it doubles up in
size. So it goes sort of like 100%, 200%, 400%, 800% and that isn't particularly useful for some
people because they might actually want something that's in between 100% and 200%. But fear not,
fear not! There is a way of customizing this and I'm going to open up the magnifier settings,
which is control windows and M , for mother. And in this screen here, I can determine
how much the magnification increases whe
n I press windows and plus. I'm going
to tab down to the option...... ..... and there's an option here called change
zoom increments and it's currently on 100%. I'm going to put it on 25%. Okay and I'll press the
enter key to choose that one. I'm now going to go back to word......... So now, in Word, here,
if I press Windows plus it won't go as large as it did before just go smaller increments. It goes
slightly bigger in slightly smaller increments, allowing me to choose a more suitable siz
e.
I've got five percent and ten percent increments as well but, to be honest, you'd have
to be pressing the keyboard a lot just to change it to somewhere near what you
want to get to. So I've put it on 25% which works really well. And that's Windows
key and minus to reduce the magnification. Let's put it on...... that's a decent one to
leave on, I believe. So that's pretty much, apart from one other feature, the magnification
and vision related options for Windows 10. Now what I'm going to
do here; I'm going to
go to my desktop and my mouse is in the centre of the screen-ish- ish. Now I've
set up a little feature here whereby, if I couldn't find my mouse pointer, so
sometimes I've done this before in the past.... I just can't see where the mouse is for
love nor money, I can't see it! So I've set up an option here it's called..... oh I forget the
actual phrase of it, but basically it's just to highlight the mouse pointer when I press the
Ctrl key. I'm going to press the Ctrl
key...... Can anyone see what's happening here? When I press the control key, a
circle surrounds the mouse and flashes so it's giving me a bigger
area to see. It only happens when I press and release the control key.
Jana, have you used that before? "Errm...I ....no I do think I have, actually"
So it could be quite good for someone that's got you know reasonable-ish vision but struggles
to see the mouse pointer initially. And you can just press the control key repeatedly and
it flashes an
d gives you an indication. "So do you have to have something else switched
on in the settings for that to happen?" Yes, I'll go through it, Jana "Okay, great. Thank
you" So I'm just going to go through..... I'm going to turn magnify it off briefly
here ....I'm going to go through how to turn this feature on. I'm going to go
to the start menu and type the word mouse So change mouse pointer size, that's what I want.
Now there probably is a more direct way of getting to this, but this is the wa
y I'm going to
do it. And then I'm going to come down to the option on my screen called additional mouse
settings and it's a little button. I'll press enter on additional Mouse settings....
...it brings up a new screen..... and strangely I have to go to another option in
this screen called additional mouse settings. It seems a bit weird I have to go through
it twice but that's the way I get to it. And here it is additional mouse settings
'mouse properties dialogue buttons page button configu
ration switch primary and secondary buttons
checkbox' And this is mouse properties. Now I suspect I could have got here quicker by typing
the words mouse properties into the search box of the start menu, however this is the screen we
want. Now in here we can actually change the shape of the mouse and all those sorts of things but the
one we're looking for.... this is a multi-tabbed dialog box... so at the top of the dialog box
there are tabs. The current one is called pointer, I'm going to
go to the next one ...point first
page scheme and the next until I'm on pointer options. So pointer options is the tab that I
need and in here the option is called ....... show location of the pointer when I press the
control key and currently I've got it ticked, or checked, as it's called so this.... I'll
un-tick it now..... and I'm now going to press the control key and nothing happens with my mouse.
If I tick it and I press the control key, I get the circle appearing around the mouse poi
nter. So
that can be quite nice and I'm going to leave that on for me. I think that's okay. So that's pretty
much all of the features I wanted to cover with you today on vision aspects of Windows 10.
So I'm going to close that down.... So, in terms of audible solutions in Windows 10, the only one there really is to be honest
with you that's of any decency is called Narrator. Now I've been using Jaws here.
That's simply to help me because I can't do this demonstration without a screen reader
of some sort. I'm going to turn Jaws off. Okay, so Jaws has gone and I'm
going to turn on Narrator. Now, Narrator is similar to Jaws in how it works but
it's not as sophisticated. But it's, surprisingly, quite good. So I'm going to turn it on..... I hold
down Ctrl and Windows and press the enter key. 'Mouse mode on. Desktop list. Louis Braille. 9
of 24 selected' I'll turn my volume up a little bit. Hopefully get that a bit louder.
So now, if I go to the desktop here, 'SAVI database' So, wi
th a screen
reader it's 99% keyboard driven, so the screen reader responds to keyboard
commands and presses. So, I'm on my desktop, I've gone to my desktop. I'm now going to move
my cursor up to read the next icon. 'Louis Braille 9 of 24, Assistive technology folder
8 of 24' and as I navigate.... 'Louis Braille, FS reader 3.0' ......Narrator reads out what is
currently highlighted on the screen. The same with my start menu... if I go to my start menu
.....'Start Window. search. search all
apps. Word 2016 Outlook 2016 Excel 2016 file explorer'
So I'm going to Outlook briefly, I'm not going to open any of my messages but I'm going to
go in there to see how it works with Outlook' Let's just see here "Can I ask? Are you just using the arrow keys when you're moving" I was just
using the arrow keys, yeah yeah. "Can I make a comment please, Gary? I think the
slower reading speed with Narrator will make it easier for novice users " I've just set it to
that speed because when you do
demonstrations, Jonathan, it's best to set it to a slower speed.
Because a lot of people can't understand it unless they're used to be using a screen reader. I
set it to a slower speed, but yes of course you can increase the speed and you can change
the voices as well. "Yeah, I know that" So I'm just going to go through my inbox here, again
just using my arrow keys and let's just see how it works. 'green column header from rw one of 23.
column 5 of 11. 17 forward slash zero four column head
er subject column 6 of 11 Tuesday the 28th
of March 2023 ' Let's try something here..... 'scan off no no help desk mary navetto one
three seven two three replied no no Susanna McDonald narrator of Windows accessibility'
So I'm just reading my messages that are in the inbox. I'm not opening them or
anything like that! This one here isn't particularly private so let's just open
it up and I'll show you how I can read it. So I'll just press the enter key to open it up.
My machine is being part
icularly slow at the moment which is not very helpful. 'command not
available. I just did a review with the client scan off blank I just did a review with the client
happy blank she was explaining how she struggles with reading her bank accounts and numbers on the
web generator facility helps with this or is there an alternative blank kind regard blank Susanna'
and I'll press the Escape key to close. So, for a lot of people I mean particularly
those people that are a bit more mature, maybe
in their late 60s 70s and upwards having the
ability to have their emails read out to them is quite err.... what's the word......it's liberating
to be honest they've got they might have gone a few months, if not years, not being able to read
their emails or any other documentation and all of a sudden they find out about Narrator
that's already built into the computer, they don't have to spend any money as
such, and they can now read their emails. The voice on here can be changed I've got
i
t on what I think is called Raymond or something stupid like that, and there are ladies'
voices and men's voices and different pitches, you can change the speed etc. So let me go back
to that little Louis Braille document....'Louis Braille dot doc Louis' Let's read this document
here. Now I can read it line by line by pressing up and down arrow. I can read it word by word
by pressing Ctrl right arrow and Ctrl left arrow 'the life of...... full stop blank' 'Paris where it was buried in France
it'
Just bear with me one second ....... and I can read the whole thing by pressing the
caps lock key and the down arrow key together. 'introduction Louis Braille invented Braille
a worldwide system of embossed type used by blind and partially sighted people for reading
and writing it has been adapted to almost every known language from Albanian to Zulu he died in
1852 and for a while it seemed as if this system would die with the inventor thankfully a few key
people realized the importan
ce of this invention' I'm going to stop it there. Now I'm sure some of
you noticed this..... when it reads like that, the screen flashes quite a lot. It's moving
through the text and the screen flashes quite a bit and I can't seem to find a way of
stopping it doing that. I'd rather it just move down nice and smoothly something like like this
...... so, when you're reading it continuously, the screen will flash so that might not be great
for some people. You can configure narrator to read wh
at is underneath the mouse pointer.
So I'm just going to put the mouse pointer on a block of text and it should read it to
me 'the blind pupils were taught practical skills like checking' I'll just go to the
top ....'to try he picked up an all a sharp' I'm gonna put that Mouse pointer on the
text ' just with Braille talking books and computer training for example
but with imaginative and practical solutions' Let's just turn this magnifier off..... 'he lost his sight altogether he was aged
only four but still went on to become one of the most famous' I'm just moving the mouse
pointer over the text but something strange is happening here! I wasn't expecting this. There
are two ways of using Narrator; one is in standard mode and one is what's called scan mode and
scan mode is for one when you're on websites 'in France itself Louis Braille's achievement was
finally recognized by the state in nineteen....' So you can it read what's under the mouse
pointer or you can just use your
cursor keys or your arrow keys to go up and down
through the document and it will read it out. 'Paris where it was buried in the pantheon
the home of France's national heroes' So I need to look into why the screen flashes like that.
I can't find a setting anywhere that allows me to stop that happening but I'll need to do a
bit of Googling, I'm afraid, on that. "yeah, it will be cursor tracking or something" Yeah,
it is, yeah, I've looked at pretty much all the settings. I can't find one th
at seems to stop
it but maybe there is one that I've missed but I don't know these things happen don't they?!
I'm just going to go back to the desktop ..... So now I can put my mouse pointer over an icon and it reads it out to me 'Adobe
Acrobat word 2006 Savi database' Even that little feature can make a big difference
to somebody. So you might want to look for a save button or a send button and you're not
quite sure whether it's the right button, you put the mouse on it and it will tell yo
u what
it is. So I just want to show you one more feature that is really nice and this is on the web. I'm
going to go to Microsoft Edge. Now, ordinarily, I use Google Chrome but this feature I'm going
to show you is only available in Microsoft Edge. So hopefully that will load up...... 'Microsoft Edge 4 of 24 selected' 'scan curvale 1000 Zoom 2 of 24 non-selected
on SFS contacts one of 20 scan off address and search bar edit search or enter web address'
So I've gone into Microsoft Edge, it
seemed to take an age to get there, didn't it? And I've
got a bookmark or a favourite that I'm going to use just for this particular demonstration.
So I'm going to go to my favourites....... 'button scan new tab zoom in enter full
separator favourites favourite drivers' 'command not available alert
graphic 11 graphic favourites' Let's forget that and I'll just
find an article............... 'scan favourite favourite Spa Banner
insertion point before scan off search by image button app laun
cher but link crowd
and cloudy 12 degrees Celsius graphic 55. new tab profile 1 Microsoft
Edge Window search button' 'address and search bar scan off' I'm going go to BBC's web page 'scan
address and search bar edit 8 still loading home BBC News BBC link home page
loading complete blank link graphic' So I'm going to find a news headline to read
'accessibility news navigation BBC News home top stories heading level two top stories link
live Camilla and Elton John pay tribute to Paul O'Grady
link from entertainment under link Paul
O'Grady link TV star Paul link from entertainment and arts' I'm just going to find something
a bit more happier than Paul O'Grady passing away 'and to house migrants in ex-military
bases link from UK link renters struggle as homes to let Link link Nashville shooter
sent me messages before attack link from U.S and Canada' I'm just using the narrator here
to navigate through the links. 'Link second time lucky for the King on First State visit'
Let's go
for that one. Let's have a look at that 'loading page King Charles's first state visit
what to expect from Germany trip BBC News' Now I could read this webpage using Narrator but there's
a feature built into Edge and it's called Read Aloud or it used to be called Immersive Reader.
So Read Aloud would read this webpage out to me without me having to find the information. I'm
just going to see if it works.... hopefully it will. 'King Charles's first state visit. What
to expect from Germany t
rip. 10 hours ago Getty Images King Charles and Camilla the queen consort
pictured in 2019 will be building relations with Europe on the trip to Germany by Sean Coughlin
Royal correspondent. It's second time lucky for King Charles's first overseas state visit when
he touches down in Germany on Wednesday. It should have begun at the weekend in France but
when it looked like the King was flying into a ......' So I'll just stop that there briefly. So
this is called Read Aloud or Immersive Read
er and I just pressed the keyboard command Ctrl and shift
and the letter U. Quite why that's u, I don't know but Ctrl, shift and u will start the reading and
the quality of the voices are excellent on here. these are these are what's called cloud-based
synthesizers so they're not something you can install onto your computer, they only work on web
pages at the moment, but I'm sure they will come to the standard Windows operating system as time
goes by. And Ctrl, shift u pauses it and then I'
ll do a Ctrl, shift u again ' initial stage of the
visit had to be postponed. The French protests were a reminder that even fairy tale palaces
have real world political consequences and it became impossible for president Macron to host
King Charles at Versailles with the prospect of angry protesters outside the gates. A bouquet of
tear gas and an empty pins wasn't...' There are some options 'voice options' So I'm going to
go to voice options. 'voice options dialogue speed slider at 1.25 cho
ose a voice Microsoft
Guy online' Lets have a look at these voices. There are literally dozens of these voices. Let's
trying something different '116 of 306 Microsoft Jenny online natural English United States 117
of 306 Microsoft Michelle online natural English United...' Let's try her and see what she's like.
'choose a voice Microsoft..... exactly the right atmosphere for the Diplomatic courtship of a
state visit EPA. Street protests over pension reforms stop the King's planned visit to F
rance
so several days later than planned a curtailed trip is getting underway again with King Charles
and Camilla the Queen consort arriving in Berlin for a three days' Let's pause it there. So there's
lots and lots of different voices and the benefit of this particular aspect here is that you don't
need to learn how to use a screen reader for this. So you you find a web page and and how it works
is the Read Aloud feature it analyses the web page first and that's why there's a bit of a paus
e
between pressing Ctrl, shift U and then reading. It analyses the page and it decides what is the
relevant text and it reads it out. It ignores all the links and all the graphics, it just reads the
text. So that can be quite nice for someone that really is struggling to get to grips with a screen
reader but would like to have their web pages read out to them. Anyone ever heard of that or used
that before? Read Aloud or Immersive Reader? "No! I think that's really clever the way it works ou
t
which pieces are most relevant because....." It is good. It's very good ....certainly for things
like web pages on the BBC which happen to have lots of links embedded into the article etc.
It just ignores those and just reads it quite normally and the voices are terrific. They really
are good. "Is this quite a new feature then?" It's been around for about a year or maybe 18 months
but as time's gone by it's improved. It's got better so this is as good as it's ever been and
it will only g
et better, it'll only get better, definitely. And these voices, I say they're
natural, they're only available online. They will come to Windows 10, I'm sure. "Gary, is
there another way of launching it apart from that keystroke?" Yes, there is, Chris, you can
go to the the the file menu .....I don't think it's called file menu ......it's the menu at the
top right corner in Edge .....what's it called? Can Jana or Madeline.... so
the menu at the top right corner what's its name? it's got a na
me hasn't it? "Errrrm... so VoiceOptions? Is that where
you're looking?" No... so I'm going to go into the menu.... this menu here..... "Oh
that menu!" But what's that menu called? Ot's normally got a name at the top. "So it's
just got three dots at the top" Okay...let's just call it the file menu .......and it's alt and
F to open the menu. Alt plus F to open the menu. And in there ....I'll just go down 'New Tab'
Okay so it should read aloud in there. 'zoom, collect history, shopping, downl
oad, apps,
game, micro, performer, separate, print, webcam, website, share, find, read aloud, menu item 20'
So, I've just gone down the list 20 times. It's easier to go up the list. If I press enter on
it, it should read it Out. 'Read aloud, toolbar team Charles's first date visit what to expect
from Germany trip ten hours ago Getty Images' And when you use the menu method or the
Ctrl, shift, U method, the focus is actually positioned on the pause button. So you could
just press the enter
key to start and the enter key to resume. Sorry! It's enter key to pause,
enter to resume. I'll do that and press enter 'King Charles and Camilla, the queen consort,
pictured in 2019 will be building relations with Europe on the trip to Germany, by Sean Coughlin,
Royal correspondent.' So it started again, Chris, because I chose it from the menu, read aloud, and
it just started from the beginning. Had I pressed Ctrl, shift, U it would have resumed from where we
were reading previously. So I
think Ctrl, shift, U is probably a bit easier to press, to be honest,
rather than go through the menu, but you know some people might have dexterity problems, who knows.
So, yeah, there's two ways of doing it. "When it's reading it goes on different colours..
Sometimes yellow and sometimes...Why's that?" I think it highlights the text that's
being read. I believe it does. It highlights the text that's being read out.
"but sometimes it's yellow and then the next word is highlighted blue" I s
uspect because
I'm using high contrast. I'm going to turn high contrast off and then we'll see if it does
the same. So I'm going to read it now ........ 'pause read aloud Ctrl and Shift cap U,
continue to read aloud Ctrl and shift button Second time lucky for King Charles's first
overseas state visit when he touches down in Germany on Wednesday. It should have begun at
the weekend in France but when it looked like the King was flying into a riot zone, the initial
stage of the visit had to
be postponed. The French protests were a reminder that even fairy-tale
palaces have real world political consequences and it became impossible for President Macron
to host King Charles at Versailles with the prospect of angry protesters outside the gates'
"I think they're different colours when they're speaking the word, that's what it is" Yeah,
I think what happens is.....because when I have high contrast on it in a way it reverses
the colours that are on the screen, so when it comes to a p
icture or something like that "Yeah,
it doesn't matter" It's reversing that colour and, therefore, changing the screen but I think
generally speaking it'll be blue, the highlight, as it reads. "If you wanted to read another aspect
of the page, does it have that ability? Can you can you move it you know, if there's some articles
on the right hand side of the screen?" No, it doesn't have that ability, no, it's just
simply for reading content. "Yes, okay, I get it" To do that, you would use a
screen reader
to read the other articles. "Yeah, that's fine, okay" But even me, I use a screen read all the
time. I'm very proficient with it. I still like to have some things read out in a different voice.
And they are quite natural, the voices as well, they're not quite so robotic as some of the voices
that you get. So it's just a good option but what I felt I should point out to you, because you
may, or may not, be aware of it. I'm just going to close this down and go o back to my deskt
op....
I'm just going to stop the screen share....... Okay so..... I'll turn Narrator off and put Jaws back on. "I do like Jaws, it's very good screen reader" This is slow! "Do you think that Narrator is kind of competing
with Jaws now?" No, it's not however it's a good place for someone to start. So if you start
with Narrator, very quickly you'll get an idea of whether you like a screen reader whether
you don't like you know the speaking to you. because some people just don't like it. I don'
t
know why. If you've got no vision it's the only real way of getting information from a computer.
So I would start with Narrator and then you can progress onto another screen reader which is
free. It's called NVDA I'm sure you've heard of that particular one. That's free and it's actually
quite good, you know. So Narrator is, if you like, the bottom one, NVDA is in the middle and Jaws is
the the big daddy I suppose you could call it. And the reason why Jaws are so popular amongst people
w
ho are in employment and in education as well, like university....it's just so configurable for
what you want to do and the response time of the reading is very quick. So you don't have to hang
around and wait when you press a key to wait a second or two for something to happen, it just
happens straight away. But, of course, these come at a cost, these screen readers, you know they're
six or seven hundred pound upwards, ordinarily where Narrator and NVDA are both free. And if the
person onl
y wants to read their email or maybe create a shopping list or something on a computer,
they don't need something like that. So Narrator or NVDA would be perfect for that. And also, it's
always good to have more than one screen reader on your computer because you know occasionally Jaws
will stop working for some reason or other. So in that instance I use Narrator to get myself
out of trouble and then restart the machine, if necessary, and then get Jaws back up.
So it's always good to have kn
owledge of more than one screen reader. Fortunately
the keyboard commands are all very similar from one to another. So NVDA, Supernova,
Narrator and Jaws use very similar keyboard commands so there's not much learning curve
between the three of them, or four of them. Yeah, so your original question....Narrator
doesn't really compete with Jaws, it's just the baby, if you like of
the screen reader world and it's not been around as long as Jaws
and NVDA and Supernova. I'm sure Microsoft will
improve it as time goes by .
So I want to use this next five minutes or so for any questions, queries, anything you like
really. "So the thing is Gary, I'd like to thank you very much for doing all these webinars.
I mean I don't need them at the moment but I might need them in the future, so I'd rather
get to know them before I need them" Yeah, exactly...To have some future knowledge is is
good isn't it? Just in case something happens to your vision that means ......."It's getting worse
but
I can still read the computer but um anyway, that's why I come on to them, because it's nice to
know what I can have in the future if I need it" Yeah, yeah, and in the future things will only
get better, so they'll be similar to what they are now but they'll be of a higher quality and
they'll respond much quicker to your requests. Jana, can I just ask...? "Yes?" How many people are you working with that have
got vision impairments? "So, we've got 150 between two of us" That's a lot, isn't
i
t?! "Yeah it is! We need someone like you, desperately! Oh my goodness it would be
so great, it would be brilliant! But we are just thinking about introducing Narrator to
some of our students as a starting point. Some that have deteriorating vision conditions and I
just wondered do you have like a list of sort of key hotkeys or shortcuts that you would use with
them?" Are you on a PC at the moment? Oh you are, obviously!! Can you go on to our website,
Jana while you're here? Can you get to
it ? Okay and on the home page
there's a link called Technology, I think it's called.....Technology and Equipment And on there, there's a link
called ICT handouts. And on there, there should be a document in the Windows
section....... an introduction to using Narrator "I can see magnifier, mouse pointer,
volume, accessibility features for people with ........" That's the one I'm going to email
out to you all" Is it not on there, the Narrator one? I can put it on there but, initially, I
can
send it out to you. I'll send it to you. "I can't see the Narrator one" But it hasn't got
all the keyboard commands in it. It's got the most common ones in it. "Okay, I mean I know there's
so many and it's just working out where to start, isn't it really? I suppose it's just finding out
what the students are doing the most. Like what tasks and then trying to work out which shortcuts
will be helpful" Definitely and it's one of those things you just turn it on and off as and when
you need it
. You don't have to have it on all the time . It's really, really useful. I just suggest
that when you've introduced them to Narrator, I probably would move on to NVDA fairly soon
after that. NVDA is a bit more functional a bit more fully featured okay and NVDA is free but
the only thing with NVDA, and you find this quite a lot in schools and universities, because it's
open source software, some IT technicians don't like putting open source software on their systems
because you can introduc
e viruses through open source software. I've never known that happen, to
be honest. "That's helpful to know, though because definitely we come up against a lot of barriers
with IT in schools "Can I add something Gary?" Jonathan, yes. "The NVDA front page, if you like,
has a very, very simply accessible list of all the commands and settings and you simply scroll down,
or use the arrow up and down key, and then press enter and you get a list, an easily understood
list, of what the shortcuts d
o." Okay. Brilliant, Jonathan, thank you "Oh that's helpful, thank
you!" I do have some keyboard lists of Narrator, Jaws, Supernova etc. Would that be beneficial to
put on our website, do you think? To just have those lists available for download? "Yes, I think
it would" You think it would? The only thing is, I think it was Jana said a minute ago, is there
are just so many commands all I tend to do is list the most popular and common ones. "That's helpful,
I think because you can get a bit
overwhelmed when you start Googling, because everyone has a
different viewpoint on what's useful!" Exactly! So I'll try to get those uploaded and that Narrator
document uploaded. I've got lots of other stuff to put up there and it just takes time for me to
create it and then for it to be published onto the website. So I've just finished doing some iPhone
lessons for iOS 16 and I'm gonna put those up today. "Brilliant! Do you still...... sorry! I'm
totally taking over here" I apologize every
one! I just wondered..... do you offer tutorials to
groups of students? I can't remember. So obviously whether or not you would do that remotely ....but
if we were to gather a group of students together that had a similar need is that something you
would do?" We could do that but we'd have to charge for it. "Yes, of course! Absolutely"
Yeah, we would have to charge for that, we couldn't do that as a ......"no, no. I wouldn't
expect you to. I just wondered" We could do that and to be honest
it's best for that sort of thing
if you drive what it is you want to know. Because if I come on there and say to you, oh let's have
a look at Voiceover and you might not want to know about Voiceover you want to learn about something
else. So if you drive..... you email me and say these are the topics we want to learn and then I
can see if I can put something together for you. "Okay that's helpful to know. Thank you" Yeah and
the same with screen readers with Jaws as well or whatever. Yes, w
e can do that. "Ah, I just wish
we had one of you in-house!" The amount of people that tell me that!!! "I think everyone would
like one of you by their sides" I've been cloned, virtually, loads of times before! "Oh no but this
is so brilliant what you're offering right now, so thank you!" No worries, no worries and it's
nice to see you coming along you know. Hounslow have been very generous so Sight for Surrey over
the last couple of years. They've helped with some funding towards our ECLO
service and it's good to
give something back. So do come along to all of these events if you can make it. The next one, I
think, might not be so much for yourself but it's Talking Books; what's available, where can I get
them from and how can I listen to them. It may be of use, it may not. So do come along. We'll send
out invitations about a week before the event. John? John Tagg are you still there, John ? "Yeah,
I'm still listening" Is any of that useful to you, John? "Well not really in
as much as I'm probably
already set up. I've got [unintelligible] that comes up automatically and screens that talk to me
all the time but it's interesting to see what else is available. I can do a Jaws one, or Supernova
one you know , if I get enough people requesting that we do that. I'm more than happy to do that.
So if you wanted to know about certain aspects of Jaws or Supernova or NVDA indeed, I'm more than
happy to do that. What are you using, John? What software are you using? "NVDA
I think it is. I've
been trying to trying to close the screen down so I could see what I was actually using but ....."
So, if we've got no more questions everybody, I think we'll draw that to a close for
today. Thank you all for coming along. I will send some stuff out to you just
after this. Well, I'll say around about 1.30/2 o'clock. I'll send you some information
or I'll get Sue to send out the information and you'll have that to digest . "Thank you very
much, Gary" No problem , I'll se
e you soon!
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