Accessibility for People with Disabilities
Accessibility for People with Disabilities |
|
Users who are deaf or hard-of-hearing or who have limited ability to distinguish sounds might find the following options useful. These features incorporate sound scheme adjustments or visual media as substitutes for sound.
Users who are hard-of-hearing or who work in a noisy environment can adjust the pitch and timbre of sounds, as well as the volume associated with various on-screen events to make them easier to distinguish. The sounds are customizable either through the Accessibility Wizard or through Control Panel.
Windows provides sounds that users can associate with many events. These can be events that Windows or programs generate. If users have difficulty distinguishing between the default sounds, such as the beep to signal an inoperative keystroke, they can choose a new sound scheme, or design their own to make the sounds easier to identify. In Windows 2000, users can turn off the default downloading of sound files.
If the computer has a sound card, users can adjust the volume for all of the Windows sounds by using the Sounds and Multimedia icon in Control Panel. They can also adjust the sound volume by using the speaker icon on the taskbar or by using Volume Control.
Some users require visual feedback instead of sound. Users who are deaf might rely on sign language as their primary language and English as their second language. They might have difficulty reading pages that use custom fonts; that depart from typographical convention, such as mixing uppercase and lowercase letters; or that use animated text displays. In such instances, users are likely to benefit from customizable sounds and closed captioning.
The following Windows 2000 features are useful to people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing.
ShowSounds, a feature in Control Panel, instructs applications that have closed captioning to display visual feedback in the form of closed captioning. In Windows 2000, users can choose to display closed captioning.
In Windows 2000, the SoundSentry feature supports only those sounds that the computer's internal speaker generates; it cannot detect sounds made by a multimedia sound card. If the computer has a multimedia sound card, the user or administrator might need to turn off this hardware to force the computer's built-in speaker to play the sounds. In this way, SoundSentry can detect these sound events. The user needs to restart Windows for this change to take effect.
Use Microsoft Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange (SAMI)/Direct Show for closed captioning. SAMI is a format that developers, educators, and Web authors can use to create captions and audio descriptions in a single document. SAMI is based on HTML to provide a familiar, readable format. With SAMI, developers and others can create closed-captioned multimedia products. The Windows Media Player on the desktop synchronizes the captioning information for the user, who can then adjust captions to suit individual needs.
For more information about SAMI, see the Microsoft Accessibility link on the Web Resources page at http://windows.microsoft.com/windows2000/reskit/webresources.