Speaker 1:

Hi, my name's Jarrod and I'm a member of the Digital Support Team.

Speaker 2:

Hi, I'm Joe. I'm from Disability Inclusion.

Speaker 1:

And in this video, we're going to be looking at our Windows PC and some of the accessibility options that are available to us.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there's some great features built into our Windows devices that so many of our teachers and students are using. And so many of those accessibility features can benefit all students in the classroom, but can really be personalised to support some students with disability. And some of those features really can help students access their learning and the curriculum, help them communicate with each other, can help them to demonstrate their understanding as well and what they know. So some powerful features built in.

Speaker 1:

And there's so many that people probably aren't aware of, so we'll jump in now and we'll have a look at some of those options that are available to us. So on the screen here, we're going to jump into the accessibility settings, and there's two ways we're going to do it. The first way is to click here on the search bar and just type in settings. When I click here, it's going to bring up all the settings for our Windows PC, but I'm specifically looking for the accessibility options that you can see here.

Now, these Accessibility options are broken into three categories. You've got the Vision accommodations we can make. The next one, you've got some of the Hearing options that are available to us. And then finally, interaction and the way that we interact with this device, depending on the needs of our students. So we're going to jump in and have a look at some of these, but before we do, as I said, there was a second way of bringing up these options, particularly if you want to just be able to turn them on and off really quick. So there is a keyboard shortcut, which was the Windows key and the letter U, and that brings us straight into the accessibility options. That's really good for toggling on and off.

And the first one I want to look at is this one, Mouse, pointer and touch. So when I click here, it's going to take us to those options, and we have so many available to us here. The first one is Size. Depending on the needs of your students, you might need a really big mouse. I find this really helps in the classroom regardless, but you've also then got options to go, maybe you just want a plain black cursor with a white outline. Do we want a high contrast one? As you can see, as you hover over, you get that differentiation or do you like a nice bold colour?

And I also like being able to change these based on maybe what the background is. If it's particularly yellow, choose something that's a bit contrasting to that. I just have mine on blue because I like that one.

Speaker 2:

What's nice is, you can really personalise that because some of our students may have colourblindness or low vision, things like that, where they really need to pick the right colour or the right contrast to make sure they can see what they're doing and be able to navigate around the screen.

Speaker 1:

Nice, yeah.

Speaker 2:

And the teacher will be able to do that on their screen as well, will help students to see where the teacher is on the screen as well.

Speaker 1:

The more visual you can make your mouse, I think the better for everybody. So I'm going to click back now on accessibility, and we're going to have a look at another option here. And this one is going to be also around that sort of theme of colour, around Colour filters. So I'm going to click on that. And we've got a bunch of options. At the moment, my Colour filters are turned off, so I can just simply hit, Toggle it on. And then we have a range of choices that we can choose, but also adjust. So you might can go with a very grey scale look. There's this one called grayscale inverted or even just what we call straight up inversion. This one's really good for that contrast.

But perhaps if red and green is something you need more or less of, you can turn the colour boost up and down. Let me just scroll up a bit because it looks a bit nicer. You can turn the intensity down or up and you can really customise it to meet the needs of the student. Is there any particular ones here that relate to anything or is it just personal choice do you think?

Speaker 2:

I think there's a bit of personal choice for students. They can pick what they like. But for some students with colourblindness, for example, they might have very specific needs around what colours they can and can't see. So it's about working with the student and their support network to find out what is those specific things they need and then going in and playing around with those settings and finding out what's going to work best for them.

Speaker 1:

I really like that. It's not one-size-fits-all, but you can adjust to suit. I think that's a really important call out. I'll toggle that off for now, just while we go and explore one or two more options. So let's turn off Colour filters. Actually, just before we leave Colour filters, there is some overall themes rather than just adjust the colours. I am going to click here on Themes. And here you've got some overarching larger themes. I could choose this one where it changes some of the colours, but also the picture. But you think contrast themes are quite good too?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I love the contrast themes. They're a quick way just to change everything on the screen to whether it's that white on black or black on white, and quickly change a contrast to suit the student's needs there again.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. So yeah, just find what works for you. So jumping back to our accessibility options, the second last one we're going to talk about here is the Magnifier. This is a nice, quick, easy one for our students that have a visual requirement where we can really zoom in on the screen. Again, one of these ones that kind of helps everybody. There is a keyboard shortcut for this, which is the Windows key on your keyboard and the plus button, and it brings up our magnifier tool. And we're sitting here at 100%, and if we hit the little plus, we can zoom in at 100% at a time. Just as we push our mouse around the screen, it lets us sort of navigate some of those other spaces. If you find yourself getting lost at any time and you can't find where on the screen, that toolbar was, just the Windows key and the minus this time, let's just zoom back out.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. What I love about this one, obviously a student on their own device could have those magnification settings built in, but a teacher who's demonstrating something for the class could bring that up as well, really zoom in on something in particular that they want the students to focus on. So another great tool that could benefit all students really.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, absolutely. So that magnifies the whole screen. In some other apps, if you hold the control key and press plus, kind of just zooms in a little bit to make fonts and stuff bigger. So lots of quick ways of improving the visualisation of that. And then lastly, we will just touch on, I think, voice commands. The computer can respond to some voice commands to turn on and off for a few other features like that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. This is a great one for students who might have difficulty using a mouse or navigating their device, but they do have good use of their speech and articulation. So you can use commands to open certain things on your device to help you navigate to different places. Yeah, just another way for students to be able to access what they need on their device. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. So this one we find under the Speech heading in interaction. And this first option here lets us toggle on that Voice access. This generally works nicer in a quieter space, but with me turning that on, we'll get a little bar up here at the top of the screen, and it'll probably, when it does turn on, it'll go into what we call sleep mode, which it says now at the top of the screen. So I'm just going to click on the little microphone and then it may respond to a few voice commands.

So here I'm going to, "open Microsoft Edge." And there we go, Microsoft Edge has opened up for us. And there are a number of commands that work better in this programme. So just Google what those lists are and it'll take you to some suggestions in making this tool work a little bit better for you.

Speaker 2:

And a reminder, you got to do bit by bit because otherwise you'll see that the text coming up on screen, and it won't make sense. So you've got to do a command at a time, I would suggest, and turn it off and back on each time.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. That's a really good call out because as I said, I've turned it back on now and it's trying to enact everything we say and we might not get great results from that. So yeah, toggle it on and off as needed. So that's just a couple of the accessibility options available to us. There are lots built into the device as well as all the other programmes, but as far as your Windows computer goes, just remember that the Windows key in the letter U, bring up those accessibility options and customise it to suit your needs.

If you'd like to find more resources in this space, feel free to navigate over to the T4L... We'll start off at the Education website, and we are going to the Teaching and Learning tab. Under that we're looking for Technology for Learning. Scroll down a little bit and under Resources, and Professional Learning, we are going to find a whole section here around Inclusive and Assistive Technology. And then we just choose the type of option that we're looking for depending on the device or the environment that you're working in.

In this case today, this will probably be under the Microsoft tab where we have a whole range of short videos that can help you around some of these accessibility options. And we've got some of these dropdown menus too, which will let you launch out into a few other spaces to explore what is at your disposal in this space. And at the bottom of the screen here, there's a few links here out to Microsoft's own accessibility resources and training to help improve your understanding of all things Windows and accessibility.

Speaker 2:

That's fantastic. Really excited for people to jump in, test out some of those features and see what you can start implementing in the classroom tomorrow.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Fantastic. Good luck.

Speaker 2:

Thanks a lot.