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Microsoft Updates Paint with New Keyboard Controls and Accessibility Enhancements

Microsoft’s classic Paint program update revives the software with new accessibility features.

Windows 10’s once-doomed Microsoft Paint apparently has been given a new lease on life. The software, previously labeled as “deprecated” and all but chucked into the trash bin by Microsoft, is gaining some new capabilities in the Windows 10 May 2019 Update, the company revealed.

“We’ve introduced the keyboard as a primary input mechanism,” Microsoft’s Brandon Leblanc wrote on the Windows Insider blog. “Microsoft Paint is already fully functional with mouse and multi-touch tablet input, but customers will now be able to use the app and draw with only their keyboard.” The improvements all you to move the cursor with your keyboard arrows, activate tools with the space bar, and more. read more

Microsoft Makes Changes on How to Safely Remove External Drives

Microsoft is changing the default way Windows works with external drives.

Currently, Windows has 2 ways of dealing with the process of writing data to external drives such as Thumb Drives: Quick removal and Better performance.

Quick removal:

This policy manages storage operations in a manner that keeps the device ready to remove at any time. You can remove the device without using the Safely Remove Hardware process. However, to do this, Windows cannot cache disk write operations. This may degrade system performance. read more

The Division 2 Video Game Adds Accessibility for Gamers with Disabilities

Ubisoft’s The Division 2 is the latest game to tackle accessibility options, launching with an assortment of settings aimed at increasing inclusivity for gamers with disabilities.

Among these options are a narrator for menus, user interface editor, and various types of subtitles on Xbox.

When The Division 2 first starts up, you’ll encounter a setup menu. It’ll include the options Enable Menu Narration (English only), Large Fonts, Game Language and Dialogue Language. Menu narration and font size are part of the game’s accessibility options, and both can be enabled by toggling the setting to yes. While the option to turn on large font size has its own limitations, the menu narration leaves a lot more to be desired. read more

Microsoft Adding New Accessibility Improvements in Windows 10

Microsoft is introducing a number of improvements in Windows 10 this year to improve accessibility. The company recently outlined some of the new accessibility-related features and improvements in Windows 10 that are already available to Insiders today, as well as some that will be coming to users later this year.

Microsoft is giving much love to accessibility this year as the company continues to push ahead with making the OS more accessible to all users. The next update to Windows 10, shipping sometime in April, will include a range of different improvements to the Settings app in Windows 10 that makes it easier to navigate and control the settings. Microsoft has also made it easier for users to find accessibility-related settings within the app with the new categorized Ease of Access settings area. read more

Now Available In Narrator! AI-tagged Image Descriptions

If there was a word which is to define the era that dominates this early 21st century, it no doubt would be the cloud. Everything has moved to incorporating some cloud-based feature or another. Whilst screen reading has done OCR and other image recognition prior, this too was relegated to locally performed magic, rather than anything that used the cloud to process data. The rise of huge AI clusters which now can process trillions of calculations a second has created a better opportunity for so much more to be off-loaded to these systems. read more

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