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2015-11-4 Windows 10 What’s New and Accessible

Seminars@Hadley

Windows 10 What’s New and Accessible

Presented by Quentin Christensen

Moderated by Larry Muffet

November 4, 2015

Larry MuffetWelcome to Seminars at Hadley. My name is Larry Muffet. I’m a member of Hadley Seminars Team and I also work in Curricular Affairs. Today’s seminar topic is Windows 10 What’s New and Accessible. Our presenter today has worked for over 12 years teaching clients to use screen reading and magnification technology with both PC’s and mobile devices. Quentin Christensen formed his own business, 22 Point and under that brand, has released an accessibility award-winning Android game, written a book on Windows 10 for the blind and low vision users and has designed a collection of extra-large mouse

©2014 The Hadley School for the Blind of 38


cursors, as well as a range of blind and low vision-related t-shirts.

Quentin is now working with NV Access to write training materials specifically for that screen reader. Today Quentin will share his professional insights and expertise on Windows 10, so let me welcome Quentin and we’ll get under way. Welcome Quentin.

Quentin ChristensenThank you, Larry and thank you, everyone for joining us. Okay, so we’re ready to start. As Larry just said, I’ve been working in the field for over a decade, and I’ve been specifically playing with Windows 10 for pretty much the whole year this year. Microsoft made it available as a public beta which anyone can download and get a feel for, start developing their own software, make sure their systems work with it and so on, and so I took the opportunity to do that and get a good early feel for how accessible it was, what’s changed and all of that, and what they’ve done is they’ve actually kept that Insider’s Program going.

Previously what’s happened with say, Windows 7 and Windows 8 is that they had a public beta version of it that you could download in much the same way, test it out. Then when they released the final version, they closed that and if you wanted to use Windows 7 say, you had to



buy it, or if you wanted to use Windows 8 you had to buy it and basically, Microsoft got to look at the early versions.

With Windows 10, what they’re doing is they’ve actually changed that a little bit so now anybody can still download the beta version and use the beta version of Windows 10 and as I’ll cover that, that’s got some interesting points both ways. Windows 10 was released officially on the 29th of July, and Microsoft, very keen for everybody to be using it. If you’re using Windows 7 or Windows 8 you will be noticing increasingly insistent prompts for you to update, and as Microsoft even announced just this week, they’d only get more and more insistent about it. They’re very keen for everyone to be on the latest version, and we’ll have a look at whether or not that’s actually the best thing for everybody.

Now the release is on the 29th of July. The public response to Windows 10 so far has been basically two things. It’s been overall good in terms of the user interface and the usability and things like that. The fact the Start menu’s back people like, but there have been a couple of big criticisms, particularly around privacy. A lot of information gets sent back to Microsoft, and not everybody’s happy about that so that is one big thing. Specifically for us in terms of accessibility and how it works with say other screen readers and magnification programs, it’s broadly working well.



There are some issues which we’ll cover and there are some things which are just in a slightly different place and take a bit of time to get used to, so first of all, let’s look at the big thing for a lot of people is the fact that the Start menu is back so the Start menu is one of the key features of Windows, from Windows all the way up to Windows 7. Then in Windows 8 they got rid of the Start menu as we knew it and replaced it with this whole Start screen, so basically, the whole screen would change when you press the Windows key to this tiled interface, where you could choose any program or setting you wanted to launch or type in to the Search box.

Windows 10 is a little bit of a hybrid. It’s come back to the not full screen Starts menu with a text list down the left-hand side so similar to what we’re used to from Windows XP, Windows 7, and on the right-hand side is more of a tiled interface which looks very similar to Windows 8 so a little bit of both worlds there. The tiled interface, one thing that is arguably good is that you can have Live Tiles which are basically things like, there’s one for the weather for instance, and it not only just tells you that it’s the weather and you can launch that. It tells you what the current temperature is and what the forecast maximum is. There’s one for news and again, it gives you the current headlines and things like that so that’s useful information. Whether you want that or not is a personal choice. It is



accessible so that’s good. It works with speech. It works with magnification. It works with high contrast mode so that’s all good.

The other big, big feature of Windows 10 that Microsoft have pushed is the new Microsoft Edge Browser. Now this is designed as a replacement for Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer has been built on and patched over the years. It’s over a decade old and so it’s had a few security problems.

It’s had a few just general compatibility problems. Anyone who’s been involved in any web development, often what websites do is they have their regular version and then they have a version for specific or they have specific sections coded particularly for various versions of Internet Explorer, just because the way it was [bolted 0:07:26] on to and patched meant that not everything worked consistently, so Microsoft were very keen to come up with this new browser, rewritten from scratch, that addressed those issues, made it a lot easier to just work and be compatible with all the standards and how people did things.

Now in terms of that, it does to a large extent do that, so if you’re writing a web page it should work a lot more consistently with Edge. That’s the good news. The bad news is it’s largely inaccessible, partly due to some of the



way they’ve written it. It doesn’t work very well with most of the screen readers.

NVDA, obviously I’m working with them, so I’m a little bit more familiar with, it does work a little bit. They’ve put some effort in to trying to make it work but even they say no, definitely don’t use it yet. Still stick with Internet Explorer or Firefox for instance are much more accessible so that is disappointing, particularly since Microsoft were the first big browser manufacturer to sign up to a new agreement on accessibility in web browsers so hopefully, they will address that, and one of the things with Windows 10 being in ongoing development and new features being able to be rolled out is that they can potentially fix that so they might roll out a new update tomorrow that addresses it, and makes it all lovely and work with everything.

I don’t specifically expect that tomorrow but in the future, I’m hoping that they will, so that we don’t necessarily need to wait for the next version of Windows for instance, as would previously have been the case. One of the other big, big things they’re pushing with Windows 10 is the Microsoft Store and this idea of the universal apps that they introduced in Windows 8, what they’re really pushing with this is the idea that you can have an app or program that runs on your desktop computer, and you can run exactly the same program on your Windows phone for instance, really trying to tie you into the ecosystem there



but also on the positive side, give you that consistent interface between your various devices, assuming you’re running Microsoft ones.

That all sounds good but again, they’re broadly inaccessible. I haven’t really found any that work very well with speech. Partly, some of that is due to relying on the Edge, Microsoft Edge Browser so the backend and partly, it’s just the underlying architecture that it uses, that the store uses so again, I’m hoping in the future they will fix that but at this stage, it’s something that’s a bit disappointing for those of us who have to use that technology, so Windows Phone integration is something that they’re looking to move towards. Obviously, that was something they had in their minds when they brought out Windows 8, that whole idea of an operating system that could work on a Tablet or a desktop or a phone.

They were broadly criticized for that, for Windows 8 because it really wasn’t desktop-friendly, and so I would argue that it definitely does work better across the various devices now in terms of the interface. In terms of accessibility yes, still some work to do, and we’re still waiting for what would essentially be Windows Phone 10 as well so they’re not quite there yet. One of the other big features of Windows 10 that’s been highly anticipated as well is Cortana which it’s virtual assistant, so you can say, “Hey, Cortana, tell me what the weather is,” or “open a



document and type this text for me.” In much the same way that we’re getting used to doing with Siri on iOS or Hey Google on Android and from playing with it a bit, I found it does work fairly well.

There are the similar sorts of things that you find with Siri for instance. If you ask it something simple like what the weather is it’s fine. It can do that without a problem. If you ask it to open Notepad or Word or whatever it will do that. If you ask it to dictate text, if you want to start dictating a long passage of text it’s imperfect. It does a fairly good job but it isn’t perfect and overall, I would say if you can type and use a keyboard, you’re still broadly better off doing that. Certainly, there are some people who will find for various reasons, dictating much easier so it’s great that Cortana is there and I would say will continue getting better.

Again, coming back to an inaccessibility with it, but one issue is that the training that you can do with Cortana. There’s a series of things that you can dictate back and forth with Cortana. It pops up on the screen and says, “Say this.” You dictate it and then it gets used to your voice. They don’t work with speech, with your Narrator or NVDA or Jaws, so I’ve used it without and it still seems to do a fairly good job so I would hope if and when they make that accessible, it should be something that will improve say, that dictation that I just mentioned before.



Let’s see, so with the accessibility of Windows 10, it’s pretty good. It’s largely unchanged from Windows 8 which will be still good news for a lot of people. If you’re coming from Windows 7, there actually were quite a lot of improvements in accessibility in Windows 8 which you probably might not have noticed. If you’re coming from Windows 8, you might not notice too much difference so things like in Windows 7 you couldn’t use the magnifier in full screen mode and use say, Jaws or use anything that needed you out of the area mode like high contrast for instance. That works fine now. You can have magnifier running and high contrast mode and it all works fine.

There aren’t any new magnifier commands or options. It’s pretty much the same as from Windows 7. One thing I do like with the magnifier is that in Windows 7, there were a couple of options to follow the text insertion point and follow the keyboard focus which for some reason, were never checked by default, so it would follow the mouse but not the keyboard. They’re checked by default now so that’s a small change but something good. The high contrast broadly works the same as it ever has. You can turn it on with left alt + left shift + print screen, and what it will do is change from the standard Windows colors to something that’s broadly a black background with white text so a lot less glary and better contrast. I quite like it.



It works well in say, the Start menu and with those Live Tiles so with say, the weather that I mentioned before, what it actually does is, as well as giving you the temperature, it gives you a background that on that tile looks like say, storm clouds if it’s raining or a clear sky if it’s a nice day. When you’re in high contrast mode, it still does that but where the text is gets a black background, so they have done a bit of work there to make all that work so that’s good.

You can still change the resolution, the screen’s DPI, to make text larger and smaller and there’s an option specifically for that that goes up to 175%, so that’s a little larger than previously where it maxed out at 150. You can also still go in to the Custom settings and set that up to 500% so that would make it even larger but of course the bigger you go, you do get more potential for things to run off the edge of the screen or not be displayed properly. I did quite a bit of testing on this last year and what I found the best option was was to use the highest resolution that you can with your graphics card and your monitor. Then set the DPI to around say, 200, 175, 200 or say tended to still let everything be on screen at once, and then if you need it bigger than that again, you can go to the magnifier, was broadly a solution that worked for a lot of people. Obviously, different people will do different things and things work for them.



With Narrator, so moving on to Narrator, it was very limited in Windows 7 in what it could do. You could basically turn it on and have it just read everything. With Windows 8 there are a lot more commands introduced, so you can turn it on and turn it off, tell it to specifically read something, adjust the voice on the fly and things like that so that works very well. I wouldn’t replace a traditional screen reader with it. It’s definitely not at that stage yet. If you’re using Jaws or NVDA or Window-Eyes, then I would keep using those, but it is good to see that it’s upgraded a bit. Obviously, you could almost count Cortana in there as an accessibility feature if you like.

One other Windows feature that I have found a bit [inaudible 0:19:24] so far is settings. The traditional control panel still exists and it’s still there, and it still has a lot of options that it ever had. What they’ve also done is they’ve brought in this new Settings screen which looks more modern and is a bit simpler laid out, and what I’ve found is that there tends to be a bit of confusion between where various settings are so if you go in to display in the new settings app for instance, you can adjust some things, like your monitor settings and some of the text size stuff, but then for other things it will still direct you back to the control panel app and in fact, if you press the Windows key and type Display it will sometimes offer one and sometimes offer the other so that will be very confusing for



a lot of people, but at least at this stage they do still have all those options there.

Presumably, they’re moving towards the newer style settings, so I’m hoping they’ll migrate at least all those old controls over to that so let’s see, how are we going for time? Shall we open up for questions, Larry?

Larry MuffetThat sounds like a great idea so those of you who have questions or you want to type Questions in the text box, I’ll relay them on to Quentin and in a second here, I’m going to release the microphone so start queuing up, and if you have questions for Quentin, you got a real expert here. Let’s take advantage of it.

Caller 1Hi, Quentin, thank you so much. Great presentation. I was wondering how Serotek, I use Serotek screen reading facilities, and I wonder how Serotek is doing with the Windows 10. Thanks.

Quentin ChristensenYes, thank you. Actually, the next thing I had in my notes to go through was the various screen readers and adaptive technology programs but I’ll jump ahead for you. Serotek have said that system access does work with Windows 10 with many features. Obviously, it has run in



to the same problems that all of the others have with things like Microsoft Edge, but it broadly works with a lot of things.

They are still recommending not upgrading to Windows 10 at this stage, mostly because of those issues and NV Access also said the same thing. I would add, if you do upgrade most things work fairly well. I would still use Internet Explorer over Edge for instance, but there are some things like Edge and the store that don’t work overly well but largely what can work does.

Larry MuffetQuentin, Miley has a question. She said what is the cost of Windows 10 and how does it work with Outlook?

Quentin ChristensenThe cost that Microsoft announced when they announced the pricing so obviously, if you get a special on at a various store, that might change but the cost overall was, now I got to remember back, $125.00 for Windows 10 Home, $195.00 for Windows 10 Professional. This is US Dollars and $95.00 if you have Windows 10 Home or have the upgrade say, from Windows 7 to Windows 10 Home and want to upgrade then to the Professional version, so it’s along those lines. Specific prices at various retailers will vary obviously.



KarenHi, Quentin, this is Karen from the Blind Perspective which you wrote a wonderful article about Windows 10, but I have heard over the past week that Microsoft is automatically going to upgrade to Windows 10. There’s a lot of talk going around about that. Can you shed some light on that?

Quentin ChristensenKaren, what they’ve done is and what they announced in the last week was that the upgrade to Windows 10 would become a recommended update, and so if you’re not careful with your Update settings in Windows 7 or 8 and just let it update everything, then yes, you’ll probably find yourself in the process of upgrading to Windows 10 without perhaps intentionally doing it. There are ways around that to turn that off and I will provide some notes on doing that, and I would expect them to get more and more insistent about your upgrading to Windows 10 so if you don’t want to, then you’d want to start looking at your Update settings in Windows 10 because they’re going to start sneaking in [a bit 0:24:40].

Karen



A second question to that, so if they do that then aren’t they losing money? You’re going to have to purchase it later next year.

Quentin ChristensenThe way the updates works or the promotion that they’re offering works, and this will tie into – there’s a text question here from [Tony Marinelli 0:25:11]. If you have Windows 7 or 8, 8.1, is the upgrade still free? The way the offer works is if you have Windows 7 or 8 or 8.1, they said if you upgrade before July 31 next year, July 29th, I’d do it earlier in the month just to be sure. If you upgrade before the end of July next year, the upgrade is free and it’s free for the life of that machine so if I upgrade this desktop that’s sitting here in front of me, I can keep using Windows 10 on it for five years, ten years if the machine lasts that long so if I upgrade now no, I won’t need to buy Windows 10 in August next year, as long as this particular machine is still working.

Now their definition of this machine is, as far as I understand it, as long as I keep the same processor and motherboard pretty much, I can upgrade the hard drive. I can upgrade the memory but if I put a new processor in it it’s considered a new machine. I was trying to remember the other part of your question there. In terms of losing money, arguably not. If you think about the number of people who had Windows XP for instance when Vista or 7



came out, not many people overall raced out to buy the newer version to put on their existing machines. Definitely some do indeed but not a large percentage so in actual fact, it seems like a really great offer but in actual fact, they’re not losing a lot by doing it because most people would have otherwise just waited until they bought a new machine to get Windows 10 anyway.

Caller 2Yes, how about the accessibility of programs like, I’m working with NVDA and Quicken. Is this going to move over in to 10, or am I going to have to upgrade my Quicken or is there going to be compatibility problems?

Quentin ChristensenIt’s up to the various program so NVDA particularly was a really good one for upgrading. It pretty much worked even with some of the older versions from the start in Windows 10. It did pop up a message saying that it wasn’t compatible and you needed a newer version, but it did actually still work. In terms of NVDA, 2015.3 is the version you want. That’s the current version which works with the Windows 10. With the other adaptive technology programs, the same thing. If you’re using the most recent version they broadly tend to work.

Quicken, I must confess. I’m not familiar. I mean I know what it is but I’m not familiar with whether the current



version is compatible with Windows 10. It might be, as with a lot of programs, that if you have the latest version, that would be your best bet for being compatible with Windows 10.

There are some things that people have run in to for instance so yes, the upgrade is free but if you’re running Jaws 12 and it’s not compatible and you need to upgrade to Jaws16 suddenly, you might find yourself needing to outlay for the upgrade of that, and the same could be true of not necessarily adaptive technology but the same could be true of accounting software or any other software that you might be using.

Caller 3Yes, if you are using Jaws, if you download the Windows 10, can you still keep your Internet Explorer, or do they automatically update it to the new browser Edge or whatever?

Quentin ChristensenFirst of all, there’s a note here from Tony again. Thanks, Tony who said he’s using Windows 10 and had no problem with Quicken [inaudible 0:29:16] setting, so there’s that Quicken answer for you. When you install Windows 10, it does keep and it gives you the option to keep all of your programs, all of your files, all of your settings and things like that broadly. That works really



well. There are a couple of settings that do get lost along the way, and one of them is your default programs for things so if you’ve installed Firefox and set it as your default browser or if you’ve got Internet Explorer as your default browser, Windows 10 will override that with Edge being the new default browser but yes, Windows 10 does still include Internet Explorer, and you can still use it and you can still set it as your default.

When you first go to run it, it prompts you to jump back in to settings and set it as your default browser. It is a slightly longer step than it used to be. It previously used to be you would start a new browser that wasn’t your default, whether it was Internet Explorer or Firefox or Chrome or whatever, and it would say oh, this isn’t your default browser. Would you like to make it your default browser and you basically just had to say yes. Now you’ve got to say yes and then jump in to the settings to do that as well.

Caller 4I’m still having Edge show up on the taskbar, even though I’ve gone ahead and set Internet Explorer as my default browser I thought but Edge still shows up. Okay, I have another question that has to do with when I installed Windows 10, and this might not have any – it might just be a bad coincidence. When I turn my laptop on now, I get a little green box before anything comes up the computer just hangs, just stops.



I do a force shut it down, start it up again and get to the logon screen and I’m on, and it’s like I say, right when I installed Windows 10 this is happening. I am a Jaws user. I also have NVDA on my computer which I use some, and I do have Window-Eyes, though I really haven’t used it much so I’ve got all three of them, so anyway, comments, questions, answers, whatever, I’d appreciate it. Thanks.

Quentin ChristensenI haven’t seen that specific behavior that you just mentioned. I know there have been various issues that people have had so I know for instance, with my wife’s laptop, when we upgraded it to Windows 10 everything went across fine, except her sound card driver didn’t work, so she had no sound and the track pad, the mouse driver didn’t work so there was no mouse either. Both of those were resolved when I deleted the driver that had come with the laptop and then they worked fine. Other people have had various other issues that have been more or less severe than that, and the other thing I was going to say was yes, with having Edge still in the taskbar that will just sit there, even if you set Internet Explorer as your default browser.

That Edge you set in the taskbar you can turn that off. You can unpin it from the taskbar so if your Windows tell you to go to the taskbar for left and right arrow defined



Edge, it should be about the first one. If you press the Context menu, then it brings up a list of options, one of which is unpin from taskbar and you can do that there and for Internet Explorer, if you bring up the Start menu, press the Windows key, type Internet Explorer you can do the same thing. You can press the Context menu key or the Applications key is what Jaws calls it, and one of the options is pin to taskbar.

That’s something that I actually find really handy and I use a bit more now is that whole concept, and then you can actually press Windows 1 to open the first thing. Well, the first thing’s Edge by default but if you get rid of it, whatever your first thing is, Windows 1, Windows 2, Windows 3 and so on so that’s quite handy.

Larry MuffetQuentin, we’ve got a couple questions here in a similar vein, and then maybe after you answer this, we can move on and then leave some more time for questions at the end but we’ve had a number of people in the text box ask questions about compatibility of Windows 10 with ZoomText.

Quentin ChristensenAll right, so let’s cover that hole now. [Inaudible 0:34:44] Squared said that yes, it works with ZoomText and it



works with Windows-Eyes. They have said, let’s see, I was looking at this morning, you need the latest version of ZoomText, and if you don’t have that and you need to upgrade, I think they said it’s $45.00, $49.00 thereabouts to upgrade. Jaws works with 16., it’s gone out of my head but the latest versions of Jaws, the latest build of Jaws works with Windows 10 as well.

Serotek, as I covered before, does but they’re still recommending not upgrading. NV Access again, they’re recommending not upgrading but NVDA 2015.3 does work. Dolphin, their various programs are all compatible. One of them might be Guide is in beta, the version that’s compatible but it’s a public beta. You can download that so most of them now are working with Windows 10, whether or not they’re recommending you upgrade, but most of them do actually work currently and someone’s mentioned in the text box there 10.1 for ZoomText. ZoomText 10.1 is compatible with Windows 10 and Jaws released Version 17 last week so as long as you’re on one of the later builds of 16 or the current version, 17 of Jaws that works as well.

I was just looking back through the questions and one of the others was, do you need to answer all of the questions to get Cortana to work? No, you don’t. theoretically, by answering those questions, it helps improve its understanding of your voice specifically, and so you



should get a higher accuracy in dictation and in understanding what you’re asking if you do answer the questions, but I’ve used it without answering the questions and it seems to work quite fine so hopefully, they will make that more accessible and you’ll be able to do those questions, but at this stage, you can certainly use it without having to answer those questions.

And when they from [Inaudible 0:37:09] did I say that Windows 8 update will attempt to update either Windows 10? It will at some point. What they’re looking at doing is moving it from an optional update to a recommended update. I’m not sure exactly when they will be, but if you don’t want to upgrade, I would keep an eye on your update settings and I will find the links. There’s some suggestions floating around the web for which updates to turn off and things like that.

Okay, so we’ve looked at both third-party screen readers and magnifiers and things that all work and Glassbrick was the other one I was going to mention. Glassbrick is another screen magnifier. It works quite well with Windows 10. It’s the one I’ve been using and so it works fine as well, so the upgrade process is probably another good point to get to. You can update with a screen reader and you can get all the way through the process which is good.



When you’re on Windows 7 or 8 you can either tell it to update manually, or you can just let it from that prompt that comes up and say yes, I’ll upgrade now. It will ask you a few questions and one of the most important of those is what do you want to keep, so your options are keep all of my files, all of my settings and all of my programs and things so it will keep all of your documents that you’ve written in Word, and it will keep Word itself and it will keep your settings for how you like to have everything set up with a couple of exceptions as I mentioned before like the default programs.

You can tell it to only keep your documents so it will just keep what you have in documents. It will get rid of your program files so it’ll get rid of your Microsoft Word and all the other programs that you’ve installed, so it’ll start with a fresh copy of Windows but with your documents or you can tell it to keep nothing and it will be just like you’ve done a fresh install of – it’ll be like a fresh install of Windows 10. Whichever one you go with, I would definitely recommend doing a backup of any of your files that you want to keep, programs, recordings, photos, things you’ve downloaded, all of that sort of stuff. Make sure you’ve got a backup. That’s a good idea in any case.

When I’ve done the update on a few computers it’s worked fine, with a couple of problems with drivers like I said but otherwise it’s worked fine. I haven’t lost any documents or



anything but it’s always a good idea to have that backup, so once you’ve done that and answered those questions it will say Windows will now install. It might reboot your computer once or twice and then you’ll be ready to go, so at that point, your conventional screen reader, your Jaws, your NVDA, whatever will stop working when it reboots, and I would basically leave it then and come back say, in 20 minutes, half an hour.

I’ve heard various reports of how long the update takes. Obviously, it depends on your hardware and things like that. I found on mine, the ones that I’ve done, it took say, about an hour, an hour and a half. Other people have said anything from 20 minutes to three hours. I don’t know what sort of hardware the guy who said 20 minutes has but obviously, a lot better than mine. I would come back after about 20 minutes or so and try turning on Narrator and seeing if that works.

You’ll need to use Narrator at this point and so you can start Narrator either with Windows [U 0:41:58] which starts the ease of access facility which will start Narrator and then walk you through the options to turn on magnifier, high contract, anything else you happen to want, or you can start Narrator directly with Windows and enter. I would try that after about 20 minutes. If it doesn’t work go off, have another cup of… come back in 20 minutes or so and



try again. At some point, it will work and then it will talk you through the rest of the upgrade.

Now some of you will need to reinstall things like Jaws and some of you won’t. I’ve heard NVDA should actually still work but be ready just in case you need to reinstall any of those. Freedom Scientific have fixed their authentication server, so it shouldn’t cost you an install to upgrade to Windows10. It shouldn’t cost you an authorization so that’s good. Following the prompts, you can cancel after it’s downloaded, the update, before it installs and you can also – if you install Windows 10 and decide you don’t like it and you want to go back to what you had previously, you can do that as well. You’ve got a month after you install to do that and after that point, what it will do is it will delete those old temporary files so you won’t be able to go back.

Those files take up quite a bit of room, so it’s worth either going back or deleting them all or whatever. You probably don’t want to have them sitting around forever anyway. Okay, problems encountered, the main ones I’ve found are some of those driver compatibility and things. It should warn you before you do the upgrade or when you go to start the upgrade, it will say you have this program and that program that aren’t compatible with the upgrade and hopefully, it will do that.



One of the good things with this new way of doing Windows, in that they’re upgrading features as the same time as doing patches and things like that is that I know one thing they’ve been looking quite closely at is how everyone’s going with the upgrade and the experience the people have had, so I know that’s probably something they will be tweaking so hopefully, they will get better at that and there will be fewer and fewer problems.

Okay, oh, and a question is [vaguely 0:45:03] relevant to upgrading is if the Windows 10 upgrade is free for the life of the machine, will I be able to still get it for free if I restore my laptop to its factory OS of Windows 7? You will need to do the upgrade before July next year in order to get that free update. After that point, what you can actually do is you can make a CD or DVD with Windows 10 on it and restore it from that, and one thing that’s a bit unusual is it won’t actually ask you for a key, a software license key, when you do that because it will take a snapshot of your machine’s hardware, and it will have a look and go yes, this machine’s been upgraded to Windows 10 so that’s fine.

If you reinstall Windows 7 on it down the track say, with your original factory restore CD, I’m not sure whether you can just walk through the upgrade again or not. That’s a good question. Ideally, you’d be able to just reinstall Windows 10 after that point but that is a good question.



Okay, so should you upgrade and I noticed the time. I better move quick. Should you upgrade? Okay, so you don’t have to upgrade. Microsoft are really keen for you to upgrade but you don’t have to. Windows 7 will be supported until 2020 Microsoft has said, and Windows 8 we can expect about three years after that or so so you don’t have to upgrade. If you’re happy with Windows 7, then you can stick with it, as long as you get around Microsoft’s continuous badgering for you to upgrade. The free upgrade offer as we’ve said by the end of July next year you have to have upgraded, and then it’s free for the life of that machine.

I’m not sure what happens if you were to say, upgrade your version of Windows 7 to Windows 10 and then go and try and install that version of Windows 7 on another machine. Really that’s using the same license so you might run into problems doing that, but be careful if you want to do that because I’m not sure it will work. One thing as well is the versions of Windows 10, there are a handful of versions to choose from, as there have been for the last few versions of Windows. The main ones are Windows 10 Home which is the cheapest version. It’s what you’ll get if you’ve got Windows 7 or 8 Home or Standard. The next one up is Windows 10 Professional and so it’s what you’ll get if you’ve got the Professional version of your existing version of Windows.



One of the big differences there is with Windows 10 Home, what they’re doing is you’ll basically get updates as they come out, so when Microsoft release patches for things or say, new features they’ll test them in in-house. They’ll test them with the Windows Insiders. Then you’ll get them on Windows Home. With Windows 10 Professional, you can either opt to get both updates straightaway as well or you can opt for the current branch for business, and what that is, is it means you’ll still get serious security patches and things like that, but you won’t get those feature changes straightaway. You can wait for those for three or four months down the track.

Now that could potentially be a good option for mitigating the potential for any incompatibilities they might introduce with screen readers for instance. If they suddenly decide they want to completely change the Start menu again for instance and suddenly it no longer works with Jaws, then if you are on the current branch for business, then at least you should have time for them to fix that because it will go to the Insiders and [inaudible 0:49:20] Freedom Scientific will surely be monitoring that and noticing issues that crop up like that. Then it’ll go to the home users and if they weren’t previously aware of that, they soon will be and so then you’ve got a couple more months before it rolls out to the current branch for business so hopefully by that time,



between Microsoft and Freedom Scientific, they’ll have fixed whatever those issues were.

I just pulled Freedom Scientific out the air there. The same could apply to any of the other manufacturers so that’s the versions of Windows. The privacy concerns are another consideration as to whether you upgrade or not. Certainly, they have been well-aided as an issue, and there are people who are concerned about them and there are people who are not worried about them.

Now with a lot of modern operating systems, we know a lot of data gets sent back to the parent company so if I dictate a question into Cortana for instance, it does exactly the same thing as Siri does. It sends it back to the company and it uses their server to analyze what I’ve said and then give me the best response, so obviously, Microsoft then have a copy of whatever it is I’ve said. Whether you trust what Microsoft say they will or won’t do with that data is up to you. If you don’t want them to collect that data, then don’t use Cortana for instance. You’d have to turn that off and there are various other things that you can turn on or off as you decide what you feel safe with.

New features, main thing is particularly if you’re coming from Windows 8, you get your Start menu back. You’ve got Cortana. You’ve got some of those new features like



the Live Tiles and so on so theoretically, more robust and more secure. Definitely there have been issues so I know I find for instance every now and then, things just stop working for five, ten seconds or whatever. I haven’t been able to nail down whether that’s something I’ve got installed, whether it’s something with Windows itself or what it is. I know with Outlook for instance, every now and then when it’s checking for mail, I just can’t do anything so that’s really frustrating and again, whether that’s just me or not I’m not sure.

I actually was in Edge this morning so I was having a quick play with it and it just suddenly crashed. It disappeared and then I had to restart it again so you get those things. Hopefully, they will be fewer and fewer as Microsoft bring out fixes for them, and hopefully they will continue to get better at that. You will find I guess, too when newer and newer versions of things come out, they might bring out support for Windows 10 and then eventually drop support for older versions of Windows, so it’s always that balancing act, between being on the version that works of the programs that you’re using, so overall would I recommend upgrading?

It’s a tough question. There was some data out this morning that said only eight percent of people have upgraded to Windows 10. It’s still behind most of the other versions of Windows. In terms of uptake, it was fairly



quick out the [box 0:53:32] obviously being free, but it still doesn’t have that wide acceptance that Microsoft are hoping for. Would I update? I’m using it and it broadly works fairly stable. It works fairly well but it’s tricky to know whether some of those issues, a) will happen to you or because I’m using not the latest version of a particular program, so I’d even now maybe still wait another month or so. It’s a very difficult question to answer. Obviously, Microsoft are pushing for you to answer it one way, but don’t feel that you absolutely have to and don’t feel that you can’t either.

If you do upgrade most things work. I haven’t found too many problems. I haven’t found too many things that don’t work with speech. Obviously, aside from not using Edge and sticking with Internet Explorer for instance, most things work so all right, let’s open up for more questions, and I’ll flip back and see if I’ve missed any in the texts there.

BethI have tried to change my settings so that it does not – I’m on Windows 7, so it does not upgrade automatically or update I should say automatically, and I’ve tried to change the time and when I do that, it goes right back to 3 a.m. and automatic update so I guess that’s in my favor because that means it can’t update without my being around because I’m not on my computer at 3 a.m. but that



raises some concerns. All of the update numbers are KB three million something or other. How am I going to know which updates are Windows 10 if I don’t want to upgrade right now? Thanks.

Caller 5I have Jaws 16, the latest version and I did upgrade to Windows 10. I set my Internet Explorer to be the default browser, but it’s frustrating whenever I click a link in email from Outlook, instead of bringing up an Internet Explorer it always brings me to a radio box where Internet Explorer’s chosen and I have to say okay, and it acts like it’s not really chosen but I know I went in there and did that. I just wonder if you have an answer to that. The other question I had was how do you use Cortana? I haven’t noticed how I’d even get to it to use it.

Quentin ChristensenI’ll jump back to the original question which was around how to know which updates are which. It’s actually getting harder to tell. In Windows 7 at least, it should still give you a little bit of information about a lot of them, but some of them are in – and actually I think at least one of the Windows 10 update ones says it just includes updates and fixes or something, very vague. I know the How-To Geek site has had a lot of good articles on that, and I’ll grab that link for you in just a sec, of which updates you need to disable but it is getting trickier now, getting more insistent.



In Windows 10 they actually are not announcing as much about what upgrades – when it doesn’t update, what it’s going to update. I did one yesterday actually. It updated and it just said that it had done some updates and it had great new features for me, but it never actually told me what they were so I’m not sure what I’m missing out on. Well, actually, one thing I did notice from the update yesterday, this is to the Insiders build, so anyone on Windows 10 Home or Professional won’t have it yet but one thing for instance, I wrote a blog piece early on saying about the danger of Windows 10 updates breaking accessibility with various things. I mentioned the potential if they change the Start menu.

One thing they did yesterday with this update is they’ve actually gone the other way. They’ve actually fixed some or I wouldn’t say fixed, changed something that the Title bar in programs in Windows 10 has been plain white and so it’s blended in with everything else, so it’s hard to notice the Title bar of the current window. They’ve made that the same color as you’ve chosen for your Windows color so blue by default I think it is, and so my Title bar has gone back to being blue now which is good and there’s a blue border around the Windows so that’s good.

Now I’ve got distracted and I forgot what the question was. In terms of, that’s right, Internet Explorer, you should be



able to go in and change it. I’m sure I did that and it’s worked and not asked me which browser I want. If it’s asking you what browser you want, then it sounds like maybe you’ve cleared it but not set, so it will be worth going back into settings and programs and setting the default program again perhaps.

Larry MuffetWe’ve got time for about one more question so if anyone wants to jump in there, let’s go ahead and do that, but I’ve only got time for about one more question.

JohnHi friend, it’s John calling you from [Inaudible 0:58:46] Nova Scotia, Canada. I have a question. How do you activate Cortana? It wasn’t activated when I got my machine back from my technician, and I was wondering how do I set that up?

Quentin ChristensenYou can do that from the Start menu. If you go to the Start and – let’s see, well, if you go to Start and type Cortana it will pop up. You can set it so that it always has a little box at the top of the screen, and there’s then a keystroke that you can press to automatically activate it and off the top of my head I can’t remember what it is. Cortana by default at the moment, is not available in every country. It’s only



available in about seven countries. They are working to roll it out to other countries.

I’m in Australia right now. I know that they’ve announced that it should be available in Australia in the next couple of months and a few other countries as well. I’m not sure which ones it is and isn’t available in just at the moment. Somebody asked as well in the text about Contrast settings in Edge. I don’t think there are specifically. I know some of the browsers have various add-ins that you can set Contrast settings. Your other option is you can use high contrast mode, alt + shift + print screen. You can also use say, the Windows Magnifier and use its high contrast setting and you can actually do that and the magnification back to one time if you don’t want magnification.

I’ve traditionally found that magnification, the contrast settings in magnifiers like Magic which does work in Windows 10 I’m sure I saw somewhere, MAGic, ZoomText, Glassbrick, Windows Magnifier. I found those often work a bit better than using a high contrast mode if you just want the white on black, and oh, yeah, can we install Windows 10 to a new computer using high contrast setting? You can turn high contrast mode on once it’s done that first couple of reboots and is getting ready to set up, so at the same point you can start Narrator. You can start high contrast with alt + shift + print screen and so on



and then you can set it up so it will be in high contrast from that point on obviously as well.

Larry MuffetI have to apologize to anyone who we didn’t get to their question in the text box. We tried to get to as many as we could and lump some together if they were in a similar vein, and I wish we’d have set this up for 90 minutes because obviously, there’s lots of interest, lots of great questions here and we’ve got a real expert on hand, so I wish we had set this up for 90 but unfortunately, we’re going to have to start wrapping this one up. I want to let everyone know that this seminar, like all of our seminars will be archived on our website and available for your use any time around the clock. Also each Hadley seminar is now made available as a podcast which you can download to your computer or mobile device.

If today’s seminar has you interested in this or related technical topics, please check out the seminar archives, Hadley’s course list and also the new Hadley YouTube channel. Quentin and I both thank you for your participation. These were outstanding questions and are going to add to the worth of this seminar.

Hadley values your feedback. Please let us know what you thought about today’s seminar and please give us suggestions for future topics. One way you can do that is



by dropping us an email to [email protected]. That’s F-E-E-D-B-A-C-K, the @ sign, H-A-D-L-E-Y, dot, E-D-U. Another way to share is by completing a short online, onscreen survey I’m going to post as we conclude today. I’m going to turn the microphone back over to Quentin one last time to see if he wishes to make any closing comments. Quentin?

Quentin ChristensenThanks, Larry and thank you, everybody for all those great questions. I know there are a couple I didn’t get to. I’m not sure if we can stay in the chat after this, but definitely if you want to contact me, my website is 22point.com.au. That’s 22point.com.au and you can email me at help, H-E-L-P, at, the @ sign, 22point.com.au. Otherwise all the best. You got the link I think, Larry.

All the best to everybody in your journey with upgrading to Windows 10. I do have a book available on the subject, Making Windows 10 Easy to See which is available and it works for both blind and low vision users, but I’m definitely happy to feed [1:03:50] the questions and answer things for anybody as well and I’ll try and put a new post up today with some of those answers as well so thanks, everybody and thanks, Larry.

Larry Muffet


mailto:[email protected]


Sorry about that. There are some people trying to hop in there with one last question, but unfortunately, we’re going to have to move along. This was my first time working with Quentin and hopefully, it won’t be the last. Hopefully, we’d love to have him back and do this again some time real soon. I want to personally thank all of you in the audience for taking your time to be part of this today. Great questions. Fantastic amount of interest and it just makes us feel really good about doing this today. I want to thank you all for being a part of this today. It was a wonderful seminar. I really think we’re going to get a lot of interest on this in the archives and goodbye for now.

[End of Audio – 1:05:18]


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