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Control Panel - Ease of Access Ease of Access Center - I'll be the first to admit I'm very fortunate. As long as I have a pair of glasses I can sit down at any computer and go to work. There are many however that struggle to do what the majority take for granted. I commend Microsoft for this section of Control Panel. Spend a few minutes going through the options and you'll likely be amazed how helpful some of the options can be to folks suffering with vision, hearing, and mobility restrictions.
Ease of Access Center - This is the main page of Access Center, a very good jumping off point for all the available options. As good as the majority of the tools are, I did find narrator to be difficult to understand on quite a few occasions. There are male and female voices available and they can be adjusted over a fairly wide range to control speed, volume, and pitch. Still, when narrator was reading the 'Quick Access to Common Tools' section in the screen capture below, the word SPACEBAR was pronounced 'Spack-Bur' using the default settings.
There is a sub-link on the main [Ease of Access] category or you can get to the same place by using [Get Recommendations To Make Your Computer Easier To Use] on the window shown above. It launches a five page questionnaire related to eyesight, dexterity, hearing, speech, and reasoning to help you make informed decisions relative to which of the tools can best help to improve the user experience.
Once the questionnaire has been completed a page of recommended settings is presented. It certainly isn't anything scientific, but it can be useful and make one aware of some potential options that may be overlooked from the main screen. It's well worth completing the questionnaire and no settings are altered unless you select the check box and click [Apply] button afterward. Speech Recognition Options - Many years ago (and I do mean a lot of years) there were conversations and predictions that within the very foreseeable future, computers would be controlled by the human voice and mice and keyboards would be virtually obsolete. Those predictions still to this day surface on a fairly regular basis, and while speech recognition has come a long way from those early days, there is still a long way to go before it is a viable replacement for other forms of system/user interaction. Playing around with speech recognition can be a lot of fun, but be prepared to spend a lot of time training the system to understand your commands and return the results you expect
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