[vicsireland] Vista's Accessible Attitude
- From: "tonysweeney" <tonysweeney1@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "vics" <vicsireland@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2007 00:24:53 -0000
The Register (UK)
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Vista's accessible attitude: Ease of Access Centre gets thumbs up
By Peter Abrahams, Bloor Research
Published Tuesday 19th December 2006 09:58 GMT
Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system has just been released for
corporate consumption.
I have had an initial look at it from an accessibility perspective.
There are a variety of new functions that aid accessibility but the big
change is really one of attitude toward accessibility for users. Microsoft
commissioned
a survey on accessibility in 2003 by Forrester Research and the headline
result was that 57 per cent of adults who are 18 to 64 years old in the USA
might
benefit from accessible technology. This high percentage came as a surprise
to Microsoft; the designers then began to make accessibility more
discoverable
to all people, not just people with severe disabilities.
Microsoft had already planned to improve the accessibility in Vista, but the
survey changed the attitude towards accessibility. Instead of it being
available
to users who self-identified as having a severe disability, it had to be
made easily discoverable by the majority of users who needed the features
but
did not consider themselves as being disabled. Anyone who uses Vista should
be encouraged to look at how it is set up and see if the computer can be
made
easier for them to see, hear, and use.
The change in attitude can be seen in several ways:
The Ease of Access Centre is on the login page so you see it as soon as you
log on to Vista. In XP it is buried in the control panel section.
There is a new icon for the Ease of Access Centre: It was a wheelchair in
XP which was unfortunate, firstly because wheelchair users who are
paraplegic
may not have a problem accessing PCs, and secondly it stopped other people
clicking on it because they would assume it was not relevant. The new icon
is
abstact but bears some resemlance to the old wheelchair icon and the
stylised arrows are meant to represent the different forms of input and
output that
are available when customising Windows Vista.
However, the biggest change is in the Ease of Access Centre itself. It now
includes a questionnaire that is designed to identify any impairments in the
user with questions such as "Do you have any difficulty distinguishing
colours" or "Does background noise make it difficult for you to speak on the
phone"?
Based on this series of questions, suggestions are made as to how to change
the standard setup of the computer so that it is easier to see, hear, and
use.
This change of attitude really moves accessibility from being the concern of
people with severe disabilities to being part of ease of use and therefore
potentially relevant to any user. As I have argued elsewhere we are all
impaired to some extent (for example I do not have the IQ of Einstein, or
the eyesight
of an eagle, or the hand-eye coordination of a professional computer games
player) so it is important that accessiblity and ease of use are available
right
across the spectrum.
The assisitive technology built into Vista includes an improved
screen-magnification facility called Magnifier, a greatly improved
text-to-voice system,
called Narrator, the new Windows Speech Recognition system (there was one in
Office XP but it was a very well kept secret), and On Screen Keyboard.
Having
these built-in will enable people with minor impairments to take advantage
of them (in previous releases the extra cost would have greatly limited the
take up). I can imagine more people dictating emails because it is quicker
than typing and also reduces hand strain; or a person with dyslexia
switching
on the text-to-voice while still reading the screen.
The improved accessibility in Vista has had a side, but important, benefit
to the development of Microsoft products. The developers now have to test
new
products with the built-in accessibility tools. This type of testing can
very quickly pick up errors; for example if you listen to a computer talking
you
will immediately pick up grammar errors and also get fed up if it just says
"link, link, link..." without any indication of what the link is to.
The importance of accessibility testing as a way to improve overall quality
will be enhanced further when automated testing tools can take advantage of
UI Automation (the succesor to Microsoft Active Accessibility) which will be
officially announced with the general availability of Vista early in 2007.
Vista ease of use is a major step towards bringing accessibility into the
business-as-usual mainstream of computing.
IT-Analysis.com
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/19/vista_accessibility/
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