Thursday, October 29, 2009

Window 7 Accessiblity Hightlights

I had a good session at the ATIA conference this morning on Window 7 accessibility. While far from perfect, here's some highlights:

1. W7 has 'high DPI' settings that allow you to make icons and controls larger without losing screen resolution.

2. The on-screen keyboard is re-sizable and movable (finally), has a numeric keypad, had word prediction (!) and a scanning mode.

3. Magnifier now has keyboard hot keys, full screen magnification, a 'lens mode' and color inversion.

4. The built in speech recognition has an improved recognition engine and a 45 second buffer that it uses to determine which word it picks based on context. Unlike Dragon, it has no scripting or dedicated libraries.