Vision accessibility

- The latest global research indicates that approximately 43 million people are blind. That's a population bigger than Canada or Ukraine. Here's how the numbers break down globally. 295 million with a moderate to severe vision impairment. 257 million with a moderate vision impairment, and 507 million with a vision impairment that requires spectacles to correct the vision. Add that all up, you're getting closer to a population equivalent to the size of India. The main point to consider here, is that a much larger percentage of this population has access to technology. There are some 3.8 billion smartphone users. There's no doubt that information is reaching people with vision impairment, but is it accessible? To give you further insight in a country like the UK with good funding, where 350,000 people are blind, there were only four and a half thousand government workplace adaptations for vision impairment. That's only 1.3% of the need met. Clearly we can, and we should be doing more. There are common strategies for computer access in the blind population, which includes screen reading technologies, such as text menus and content that's read aloud with navigation. And there's braille interaction. This is where you can connect braille devices for input and output. You will find great screen readers built in free of charge in most mainstream devices. On a windows device, this is called narrator, and it's got a number of great new features. On your iPhone, it's called voiceover. And on Android, it's TalkBack. Now, for people with low vision in the workplace, there are a number of tools that everyone should know about. The first is magnified everywhere. On your PC, just go ahead and click the windows key and plus. You'll see that you zoom into a portion of the screen. We also have a magnifying lens mode and adopt portion mode. But most people are using this full screen magnify experience. You can use your mouse to move around the zoomed environment or tap the edges of the touchscreen. A great tip is to hit Control + Alt + Space while zoomed, to see a helicopter view of your screen and move seamlessly at speed into a particular section. Another great feature for vision impairment is high contrast mode. What used to be a tag on option is now actually a preference for lots of people. On Windows it's available through the ease of access center. You can apply a high-vis look and feel to your whole device and it looks great. Another feature is themes, light, dark and high-vis. Be on the lookout for these, in Teams, Microsoft docs and Windows. And also in your phone menus. Dark mood is a mainstream personal preference now. So you'll find the experience much more consistent than it's ever been before. You can just make all texts incrementally bigger on your phone and now on PC. You can also simply make everything bigger. I put it on once when I forgot my glasses, I've just left it on. It made life much easier for me. Finding your way around is a visual game. So optimize your experience. Finally, there's read aloud and the immersive reader. For many people read aloud support is the solution. All texts can be read out loud and synthetic text to speech is amazing nowadays. At Microsoft, we hear from people across all industries that read aloud is a preference now. Highlight texts in edge. Right click and select read aloud. Or find the same read aloud button in the review tab in Office. Open up the immersive reader across many Microsoft products and just press play. There are loads of options. So, look out for them across Windows, Office and iOS. Now, for some of these features will be new. For others I would say, please revisit. Things may have changed since you last investigated, but as you can see everyone can benefit from using vision accessibility features.