So I finally decided to play around with Windows again. I had a spare machine and purchased a license key for the first time in quite awhile to be honest. The installation went smooth, as I was running it on Mac Hardware so there was a few tweaks to get around but no problem that didn’t seem to already have a fix.
The main reason for using it you ask? well the main reason was for my current Legal and Management studies as I plan to be doing my main office work from this machine. This was spurred on by the fact it was 2015 that I had seriously used Windows and since the whole Ubuntu package, I have been wanting to give it ago.
I plan to be doing some of my personal web development for this blog and my info site on Windows 10 Ubuntu and will be writing up some tutorials over the coming weeks.
All in all so far it has been quite good, I am loving the new edge browser and the narrator features have been a huge bonus. Adobe Acrobat reader also has a great plugin with narrator so you can easily read your PDFs.
For my Screen Reader use I prefer to use it on and off depending on how my vision is on the day and also depending on the content I am consuming on my computer. So having the ability to use narrator specific to applications and being able to read out to me large chunks of text easily without needing it for the overall operating system is a nice feature.
The fun thing is now I have a new treasure trove of accessibility tools to play with on Windows to replicate how I do things on Linux and MacOS.
For Windows I have decided to use Dragon dictate for voice control of the machine as it helps having reduced mouse time. Then there is also Read and Write which in a way acts like a Screen Reader but has a whole group of tools it comes with for helping more on the cognitive side of computer use.
Stay tuned and I plan to be writing up a few tutorials around the assistive technology tools I am using with Windows and hopefully it will give people an insight into how the use of assistive tools can benefit in a time of increased screen and machine usage.