While discussing Windows Ease of Access Center and how you can use these features to increase accessibility on Windows 7, we talked about features like Narrator, On-Screen Keyboard, etc. How they can help you with everyday computing tasks. One feature that we overlooked is to make the keyboard easier to use.
Windows Ease of Access Center provides a number of features to enhance desktop performance. It’s basically a mixed approach. Some users love these features while others consider it a nuisance. So today we are going to see how you can enable and use these features (for the former group of people) or disable them permanently (for the latter group of people).
Sticky Keys, Filter Keys and Toggle Keys
Have you ever pressed the Shift key 5 times in a row? You must have come across a pop-up box asking if you want to enable or disable these keys. Here you can toggle the options directly, but before doing so, let’s see what exactly these features are and how they can help us.
Open Ease of Access Center and click make the keyboard easier to use. On this window, scroll down to the ‘make it easier to type’ section to see options to enable/disable Sticky Keys, Switch Keys and Filter Keys.
So, let’s take a quick look at the functions of these keys.
Switch key
Most of the time while typing, I accidentally pressed the Caps Lock button instead of the ‘A’ key and then continued to capitalize only realizing after I had typed two or three sentences. This is where the Toggle Keys feature can come in handy. After enabling this feature, you’ll hear a notification sound whenever you press the Caps, Num, and Scroll Lock keys.
Sticky keys
Sticky keys stick your Alt, Ctrl, Del, and Windows Logo buttons even after you release them so you can perform window shortcut operations without having to press both buttons simultaneously. Let’s say you have Sticky Keys enabled and you want to open Windows Explorer with a keyboard shortcut. You can press and release the Windows button, and then press the E key, even after a while, to get to the Explorer window.
There are some advanced settings that you can configure in Sticky Keys. Just click the Setup Sticky Keys link to configure the settings.
Turn on the filter key
Filter keys are meant to ignore repeated keystrokes that you accidentally press while typing. After enabling it, don’t forget to configure the default response time, otherwise you will have to wait forever to write a simple paragraph.
So go ahead, enable and try these features today. All you need to do is tick the one you want to enable. To disable them, simply uncheck the box and save the settings.
Don’t forget to share with us your thoughts on these accessibility features. Do you think they are there for no reason at all or do they prove to be useful sometimes?
Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
