Northern Illinois University
Ethics and Compliance Office
Office of the President

View Accessibility features in Windows

Ease of Access is a collection of features to customize your laptop for accessibility and usability.

Press the Windows key and type ease in the search field. You’ll see Ease of Access settings for

• Mouse
• Brightness
• High contrast
• Keyboard
• Speech recognition

Mouse Settings

Settings > Ease of Access > Mouse

• Change the size and color of your mouse pointer.
• Choose whether your primary button is on the left or right of your mouse.
• Determine how many lines the mouse wheel will scroll at a time.

Brightness Settings

Settings > Ease of Access > Brightness setting

• Make text bigger
• Make everything bigger
• Make everything brighter

High Contrast Settings

Settings > Ease of Access > High contrast

• Turn high contrast on and the background will turn black
• Choose a theme to get options for the text, links, highlighting, button text and background colors

Color filters

Windows key + Control + C to turn color filters on and off

• Reverse the foreground and background colors
• Set your display to grayscale
• Select a filter for a specific type of colorblindness

Keyboard options

Windows key + Control + O to turn the onscreen keyboard on and off

• Use the on-screen keyboard instead of a physical one
• Assign a “sticky key” for one key to replace multiple keys like CTRL+ALT+DELETE
• Toggle keys notify you when you press Caps Lock, Num Lock or Scroll Lock
• Filter keys check for repeated characters, when you can’t lift your finger off the key fast enough

Speech recognition

Complete guide to Narrator screen reader

Settings > Ease of Access > Narrator

• Narrator reads Word and PowerPoint documents, websites, email and notifications out loud
• Hear what you type
• Choose the voice, the volume and the speed

Magnifier

Using Magnifier

Windows key + Plus (+) to turn on, Windows key + Esc to turn off

• Magnifier can magnify everything on your screen or just part of it up to 200%
• Read text on your screen and outline the word being spoken

Closed Captions

Settings > Ease of Access > Closed captions

• If a video has captions, turn on closed captions
• The color, contrast and style of captions can be customized