Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Should You Upgrade To Windows 10 For Accessibility Features?
BarbaraHudson writes: Non-Visual Desktop Access (NVDA) is a free screen reader that is only available for Windows and comes with lots of features for people with visual handicaps. NVDA recommends to delay moving to Windows 10 because of problems with the Edge browser, PDF reading, Cortana, and applications designed for the Windows Store. There's only a few weeks to "upgrade" to Windows 10. My question is, does Windows 10 have compelling reasons for the visually handicapped to switch to it that are worth putting up with these (hopefully temporary) problems? Please note that NVDA doesn't require an internet connection to work; any Windows 10 assistive technologies that require one are a minus because they can leave the user high and dry with no notice. By the way, I've tried the KNOPPIX Adriane Audio Desktop and unfortunately it's really not there yet in comparison. Microsoft did highlight several accessibility features in the Windows 10 Anniversary update. Some of the features include faster text to speech, improved keyboard navigation, verbosity, AutoSuggest results, and support for more languages. In many of the core Windows 10 apps, Microsoft has made changes to Microsoft Edge, Mail, Cortana, and Groove to provide various features like modern web accessibility standards, improved account setup experience when using a screen reader, more reliable search and navigation functionality when using a keyboard, and better support for high DPI scaling and high contrast. There are also new accessibility resources available to developers, including an updated Visual Studio App Analysis tool to make it easier to find and fix accessibility errors, and support for Mnemonics in the Universal Windows Platform to help developers more easily provide Access Key customizations.
No.
As in Microsoft accessing your personal information and computer habits and selling it to the highest bidder.
For the visually handicapped to switch to it? Yes. They won't have to look at it.
Have gnu, will travel.
No, they scrapped RDP access on the home version of the OS which is LAME. Kinda defeats the idea of "Accessibility Features".
4 years is a long time, and considering that Windows 7 still has about 50% market share, Microsoft has some serious work to do to convince businesses and home users to switch to a service that does not offer significant advantages to Windows 7 users, and has lots of downsides. None of the features added to Windows 10 are of any interest to me at this point. Even Direct X 10 isn't a draw yet. I have 6 machines running windows 7 and none will be upgraded until Windows 10 offers me more control, rather than less. I don't want a service, I want a functioning OS. I am using Windows on computers, not phones, and I don't need it on phones. Microsoft has hundreds of millions of Windows 7 users to convince, and they are doing an exceptionally poor job of convincing them based on "features" (like forced updates).
It is going to be a tough sell to get the other half of Windows users to switch when the new, service based OS has so much baggage.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
If you have a PC with only 4GB of memory, don't even touch it. I had to upgrade my laptop from 4GB to 12GB for it to become really usable. I actually run the Windows Insider Home builds. My mom runs the ordinary Home version and now has an 8GB machine. I actually run my laptop closed and upgraded from a 24 inch 720p TV as a monitor to a 32 inch 1080p TV as the monitor. I was changing the size of the text in Windows elements in Control Panel Display to 20 on the 24 inch, and have the display set to 175% and still have elements scaled to 14 on the new display. For some applications I have to turn Magnifier on.
Why? Windows 8 is supported until 2022. No need to jump the gun.
Gamers probably will NOT need to upgrade. Until market share gets bigger there's no reason to require using DX12 in a new game. Right now even, no games requires DX11, there's no need to upgrade over stuff like that instead it's just for bragging rights to show how some of your pixels might look better if you squint just right.
You can upgrade now and then roll back. Then you have Windows 10 license "locked in". There's no authorization code anymore, instead it saves your machine identification in its database.
Make a backup first though. And make sure it actually works if you can. I screwed up and did a Windows 8.1 image backup. Then it turns out I can't recover from it because I don't have a recovery disk, and I can't make a recovery disk because of screwups along the way. Originally it was windows 7, then upgraded to windows 8, then upgraded to 8.1, and in that last step the update removed some files necessary to make the recovery disk, and you can't do the recovery disk from any other OS version than the one it was created for, and I made a recovery disk on someone else's 8.1 machine but it fails to find my image backup on my external drive... So I'm stuck with a lot of junk files left over from the temporary upgrade to Windows 10 which are difficult to delete. But at least it still works.
Also avoid all the stuff that asks you for a Microsoft Account or ID or whatever. Don't accept any "express" install options or defaults. Their optional default features are all useless or dangerous except for one (anti web site spoofing feature that most browsers have).
The upgrade is pretty damned slow. Slowest update I've seen yet, and it's the fastest computer I've ever done it on. When you're done it's a hell of a lot uglier than Windows 8.1, though maybe with a lot of work you can fix it back up. So roll back immediately until you have a few days to spend customizing it.
(ugh, delete a start menu item that you don't want, like a candycrush advertisement, and it leaves a hole rather than reshuffling other icons to fill it in)
other "articles" that were obviously written by covert PR drones:
>"Microsoft's newest desktop operating system comes with a range of interesting features"
>"[it's] fiscally conservative [to upgrade]"
>Windows 10 skeptics are subtly portrayed as being scared of all things new
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
Followed by a good dose of sock puppetry.
>"Windows 10 offers a range of interesting features including virtual digital assistant Cortana. While these features and a substantial boost to performance and speeds could be a big reason for the fast adoption of Windows 10"
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...