Accessibility on Windows 8.1

Just going to be a relatively quick post today, but I thought I'd cover some of the more basic accessibility options I use on a regular basis, maybe give people some idea of how to adapt an average computer.

My Eyesight

Before we go too far into it, I should probably explain roughly what my eyesight condition entails for me personally. Really, there are four key points:

• Light Sensitivity
• Contrast Recognition
• Tunnel Vision
• Blurred Vision

Most of these are exactly what you'd think - bright blocks of colour cause me to suffer headaches and other pain, which means that the standard white webpage or word document is excruciatingly hard to read.

To make it an even more fun combination, I struggle to read or see things that aren't very clearly contrasted - so having a dark page and blue text, for instance, is near impossible to read. This mostly affects images for me as I usually end up not knowing what I'm looking at.

The main life-changing affect of my eyesight (though less pronounced at a computer) is the tunnel vision, last I checked I had roughly 15 degrees in one eye and 20 degrees in another, compared to the standard 60 degrees of vision in both eyes that most people have. Now, I know for a fact those numbers have decreased since I was told several years ago, so take that as you will. This doesn't affect my screen reading too much, but it does mean I can generally only see a small portion of my screen at once - multiple screens are straight up out of the question.

And finally, the blurred vision. This changes on a daily basis really, depending on whether I'm having a "good eye day" or not. Some days it's barely noticeable, others I can hardly read or see anything regardless of accessibility.

Some Tools

So with that out of the way, I'll go over what options I normally use to make my life easier. I'm currently running on Windows 8.1 64-bit, I'll go check out my Ubuntu install later and maybe write up a post on that, since it was somewhat harder to set up.

So to begin with, I have the extremely helpful Windows High Contrast #1 theme enabled, accessed via right-clicking the desktop, selecting Personalise and going from there (alternatively tthrough searching & control panel). To go with this, I use the Windows Black (extra-large) mouse cursor which proves extremely helpful since my number one frustration is losing where my mouse cursor is. And finally, I set the default text size to the highest setting available, which I believe it 150%. This all makes for a relatively usable desktop, along with a slightly smaller resolution than my screen allows for in order to make things just a little bit bigger.

To go with this, there's a couple of other things I use on a daily basis:

• HackerVision
• Magnifier
• Microsoft Paint
• Google Docs

Now it's probably quite obvious, one of these things is not like the others. In order then, HackerVision is a chrome plugin I use that inverts all of my web pages, making them primarily black background with bright text which enables me to read them without headaches. This isn't always the case, of course, some websites are traditionally dark with bright text (which is extremely awesome, by the way), but obviously when I have HackerVision on I need to turn it off on those pages, but it all works out in the end.

The Magnifier is an excellent little tool, it can be easily accessed by pressing the Windows Key and either + or - respectively for zooming in and out. I'm sure it could also be accessed via search and menus, but that's how I get to it. It zooms the screen in rather significantly to a level of your choosing, and you can then edge-scroll the screen so as to access all of it. Very useful for reading small text that can't be zoomed due to being in an image or similar.

Now, Microsoft Paint might seem like a strange choice, but bear with me. Sometimes I come across something - a pdf for instance - that I can't easily zoom to an appropriate level, I can't easily read due to text colours and I can't easily make accessible through other means. In these cases, I fall back on trusty old Microsoft Paint. Alt-Printscreen for a window-only screenshot, boot up Paint, Ctrl-V for pasting, then Ctrl-Shift-I for inverting the page and Ctrl-+ for zooming in. Immediately almost anything I want to look at is viewable - inverted, zoomed and easily manipulated.

And finally, Google Docs. As a webpage, Google Docs is affected by HackerVision and therefore the background is dark and the foreground is white - perfect for writing documents. However, I use LibreOffice locally and it doesn't really like my High Contrast theme, so it's next to impossible to read documents I get sent for work or similar. But lo and behold, Google Docs has an upload feature! It's a fairly simple process, but uploading all documents to Google Docs in order to read it online using HackerVision has saved me a lot of headaches.

This turned out to be longer than expected! I realise a lot of this is fairly basic stuff, but as ever I hope it helps people out, even just one person and it's a success.

I'd added a blog following feature at the bottom of the page also, so you can sign up for an e-mail notification of new posts. I'm unsure how useful this is, but figured I'd give it a go. I'm a bit unsure about this whole blogging thing honestly, but I'll keep at it as long as I'm getting views and maybe helping people or providing insight.

Until next time!