Trish where can I get that custom mouse cursor and does it work with jaws,
because when I tried to use other mouse pointers with jaws they did not
work!
-----Original Message-----
From: Trish
Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2015 4:27 AM
To: Jaws Users List
Subject: [JAWS-Users] An initial,low vision look at the Windows 10 technical
preview. | 22 PointBlog!
An initial, low vision look at the Windows 10 technical preview. | 22 Point
Blog!
https://22point.wordpress.com/2015/04/15/initial_look_at_windows_10/
April 15, 2015 by 22 Point
[Image of the Windows 10 logo]
Windows 10 is scheduled for release around September this 2015, and as is
usual, there is an early version, called a “Technical Preview” available for
people to look at. It’s freely available to anyone, whether you are a
software developer, IT teacher, technical writer or just a curious consumer.
The main point to be aware of are that while it will have some of the new
features coming in Windows 10, it is beta software, and things might not all
work, so it’s not recommended to use it as your daily PC just yet.
I’ve had a quick first look at the technical preview, and while there are
plenty of sites detailing some of the key features which are new or updated,
I’ve included my thoughts here as a low vision user.
If you are interested in an audio podcast, sampling some of the new voices
available and hearing me ramble on aimlessly about my first impressions of
Windows 10, then Step this way for my Windows 10 first impressions podcast
Firstly, if you’re still using Windows 7, please jump over here for my quick
primer on Windows 8 to get you up to speed.
Ok so lets get to Windows 10. Microsoft have announced that it will be a
free upgrade for anyone running Windows 7 or 8, which indicates that its
hardware requirements should be relatively low. In order to fully test this
claim, my chosen Windows 10 test machine is a 2006 vintage HP Compaq dc7600
with an Intel Pentium 4 640 / 3.2 GHz, 80GB HDD and 1GB RAM. This machine
never actually saw action with Windows 7 – it shipped with Windows XP and
that’s what it had on it (in storage under the couch) until I bumped it up
four releases of Windows at once this week – quite an amazing feat in
itself – could you imaging taking a Windows 98 machine and slapping Windows
7 on it? I’ve run Windows 7 on similar vintage machines and I have to say
that while it worked ok early on, by now Windows 7 actaully runs a lot
slower than it did on release and so running Windows 7 on this vintage
machine is no longer pleasant. In actual fact, running Windows 10 on this
machine isn’t overly great either, but it is possible, which means that most
machines people have at home which shipped with Windows 7 from the shop
should actually run better than they have in years under Windows 10.
As someone who still uses Windows 7 for my daily driver, I found the initial
presentation looked more or less familiar, which was a relief given that the
interface is most hated aspect of Windwos 8. You first get to a welcome
screen with the time and list of users, you pick your user profile, type
your password and then you are presented with a big pretty picture desktop
background, with icons, a taskbar with system tray and clock and a start
button.
The Start button has the newer Windows logo in a monochrome white on dark
blue by default, and next to it is a large search bar – not unlike the
search box the focus moves to when you bring up the start menu in Windows
7 – and it works much the same, although being on the taskbar, you can get
to it directly now without also opening the start menu:
As a low vision user, one of the first things I did was fire up the
magnifier by pressing WINDOWS and +, and indeed, it looks and works exactly
as it has since Windows 7, and the options are the same as well (including
the strange omission of leaving “Follow the keyboard focus” and “Have
magnifier follow the text insertion point” both unchecked. If anyone knows
why they are unchecked by default or why you wouldn’t want them checked
please do let me know as I’ve been curious since Windows 7 came out!
Going into personalisation (I right clicked on the desktop and chose the
bottom option in the context menu, but you can get to it from the search
box – no difference there), I noticed the first difference – there is no
real border around Windows now. Microsoft have gone for a Modern, Metro,
Material, Minimal, whatever you want to call it, design which is aimed at
being simple, clean and refreshing. (There I think I’ve covered all the
appropriate buzzwords!) In any case, while I like it well enough overall, I
do find the lack of a border to define where windows end somewhat jarring,
particularly as it means if you have windows overlapping each other, it can
be very hard to tell where one ends and the next begins.
Next lets have a look at the most anticipated feature: The Start Menu
The nice big red mouse pointer there isn’t a new feature in Windows, it’s a
custom mouse pointer I made in Windows 7, which I could copy just fine into
Windows 10. The default stock of mouse pointers really hasn’t changed since
Windows 7, nor has the mouse options, so a custom mouse pointer like this is
a good idea. There are a range of full mouse pointer sets, including this
red one, available from the 22 Point Website here.
The Start menu itself actually looks pretty traditional: text items with
icons on the left, and on the right something which looks like the Windows 8
start screen.
I could move around the start menu with the keyboard without problem
(although as in the screenshot above, the mouse hovering over an item will
visually highlight it, though the keyboard focus may be elsewhere entirely.
In Windows 7 you had your programs on the left and your settings and
abstract folders on the right (Documents, pictures, control panel etc). In
Windows 10 you have some of each on both sides. I’m not sure how best to
rearrange it, but the left side certainly appears fluid with it’s “Recently
added” and “Most Used” sections as well as a “Places” section which
currently has File Explorer, Documents and Settings under it.
In Windows 7 you could pin things you used frequently to the start menu, and
while that option does seem to exist in Windows 10 (if you go to the All
apps list at the bottom of the start menu, you get an alphabetical list of
everything sorted by letter, and you can right click or press the CONTEXT
menu key to find “Pin to start” as an option. You can also choose a file of
any type from Windows explorer, but it doesn’t appear in the default context
menu, you have to press SHIFT and right click or shift+context menu key
before it appears), I did try pinning a couple of items to the start menu
and they never appeared there, so I presume that’s a work in progress.
You can also expand the start menu to take up the full screen and look
similar to the Windows 8 start screen, which mostly gives you more access to
those “right side” tiles, including live tiles for things like current news
and stock market fluctuations.
Turning on high contrast mode, either with LEFT ALT, LEFT SHIFT and PRINT
SCREEN, or from the personalisation screen, the start menu seems to come up
ok too:
The ALT+TAB window works similarly to how it ever has, although the preview
is now a bit bigger and the regular contrast seems ok:
Unfortunately the semi-transparent background doesn’t work so well in high
contrast mode:
I did find some things ended up unreadable, such as most of the settings
windows:
WINDOWS+TAB has been a flashier but less well known alternative since
Windows 7. I found it confusing in Windows 8 as it didn’t treat all windows
the same (anything which didn’t run full screen was lumped into a “Desktop”
category, and in Windows 10 I must confess I still don’t really get its
purpose.
It now presents you with previews of all of your Windows in a grid on screen
overlaid over the desktop, and you can arrow through them or click on the
one you want – pressing it again toggles between this view and the last
window which had focus. The main benefit I can see would be that you don’t
need to hold down two keys continuously, which would definitely be useful
for some, though I much prefer the ALT+TAB interface visually.
One thing which was an issue in Windows 7 was that you could choose one
Windows colour which shaded your taskbar, ALT+TAB window and title bars,
however the text in some (Title bar and ALT+TAB) was black whereas the text
in the taskbar and Start Menu was white making it hard to choose a well
contrasting colour. In Windows 10 this still seems to be the case, although
the ALT+TAB menu now uses a straight dark background with white text, only
leaving window title bars with black text, so overall a dark windows colour
seems to work best.
Finally, the other big thing I came across was Cortana. Familiar to smart
phone users, the ability to issue spoken commands to your PC will be
integrated in Windows 10. At this stage it isn’t as fully integrated as the
Microsoft promotions tell us it will be, but it does work. I must confess I
skipped through teaching it my voice so it’s not as accurate as it would
otherwise be if I hadn’t been lazy, but I could get it to open and close
programs and dictate text.
One amusing incident was when I had a phone call while playing with it, even
though I wandered over the other side of the room, it still picked up random
snippets of the conversation and opened and closed things (I’m pretty sure
we never actaully said “Num Lock off”, or “Open network locations”, but it
helpfully did those for me anyway). The system has the option of either
being manually turned on or off, or a constant listening mode where you can
say “Stop listening” to put it to sleep and “Start listening” to get it to
start listening again. One issue I did encounter, was when using a screen
reader such as Narrator or NVDA, Cortana would listen to the output of the
screen reader, and try and decipher it as commands. So unless that changes,
if you want to use Cortana AND a screen reader, you’ll need to wear
headphones. Cortana at this stage also didn’t give any verbal feedback of
commands as say Siri or Google Now does. Otherwise I can certainly see it
being a preferable method of input for some users.
Finally, another reminder either that Windows 10 is still not ready for full
release, or alternatively that the best days of my wife’s old HP are behind
it, I inadvertently left it running when I went out this morning, and came
back to this error:
Microsoft unfortunately still haven’t figured out that white writing on blue
isn’t the best contrast, and unfortunately their blue is getting lighter,
but the important bit of the message reads “The operating system couldn’t be
loaded because the kernel is missing or contains errors.” and going on to
suggest either using a recovery CD or contacting my manufacturer. Luckily
for me, I recently bought my wife a new laptop!
Visit the link below to take a visual look at the various new screens and
menus mentioned in this article.
https://22point.wordpress.com/2015/04/15/initial_look_at_windows_10/
For answers to frequently asked questions about this list visit:
http://www.jaws-users.com/help/
For answers to frequently asked questions about this list visit:
http://www.jaws-users.com/help/
