Microsoft Details Accessibility Improvements in Windows 8

Posted 02/16/2012 at 7:14am | by Pulkit Chandna

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Last week, a post on the Building Windows 8 blog gave a detailed account of Microsoft’s Windows on ARM (WOA) effort. Seeing as WOA is going to be the first Microsoft product of its kind, it was hardly a surprise to see the said post generate a considerable amount of buzz. According to MS, it aims to deliver a “no-compromise” experience with WOA, one that feels “just like using Windows 8 on x86/64.” Even though the latest blog post by the Windows engineering team also deals with delivering a consistent experience, the context is completely different this time.

Jennifer Norberg, a senior program manager lead on Microsoft’s HID team, on Tuesday touched upon the company’s efforts on making Windows 8 “accessible to everyone regardless of their physical abilities.” If you have been following the Windows 8 development team’s updates regularly, you probably know by now that listing similar efforts in the past is a key feature of most such blog posts. This one is no different, with Norberg looking back at the “history of accessibility in Windows.”

Windows already includes a number of assistive technologies (ATs), including Narrator, Magnifier, speech recognition and on-screen keyboard, that cover a number of impairments. However, according to Norberg, upon assessing user feedback Microsoft realized that users wanted “richer AT offerings.” To this end, the engineering team has come up with the following improvements:

• Redesigned Narrator to improve its performance so that it quickly reads out what you have selected.
• Added morel languages and voices to Narrator to support additional countries and preferences.
• Updated components and features within Windows to leverage UI Automation that allows them to be read by Narrator.
• Updated UI Automation (UIA) with more text patterns and document content so that Narrator can use it to read the outputs from applications.

Further, Microsoft has worked on making it easier for developers to make their apps more accessible to people with disabilities. To this end, the Windows 8 devlopment tools have been designed to facilitate the creation of accessible apps at every stage of the development process, from coding to selling.

Where touch-only devices are concerned, the development team’s focus has been on adapting existing ATs like Magnifier and Narrator for such devices. Once summoned, the touch-specific version of Magnifier will appear contained in a rectangular border with plus (+) and minus (-) buttons at its corners. It’s not only possible to zoom in or out using these buttons, but the same can be accomplished by “moving two fingers closer together or farther apart on the border.”
 

Narrator can be summoned into action using the Windows and Volume Up key on a touch-only Windows 8 device. If you are blind, dragging a single finger around the screen will prompt Narrator to read what’s under your finger without activating it. In case you wish to activate an item, it’s possible to do so by simply tapping anywhere with a second finger.

Image Credit: Microsoft