Windows 10 Settings menu: The Ease of Access tab

The Ease of Access tab is where you’ll find most of Windows’ accessibility settings — if you’re looking for a high-contrast theme or closed captioning options, you’ll find them here. This section is similar to the Ease of Access section in Windows 8’s PC settings menu (Charms bar > Settings > Change PC settings > Ease of Access), but with an extra section for Closed captioning.

In the Narrator section, you’ll find several options for having text and controls read aloud to you. Once you turn Narrator on, you can choose a voice (David, Hazel or Zira — same as Windows 8) and adjust your narrator’s speed and pitch. You can also pick which types of sounds you want to hear (e.g., characters you type vs. words you type). If you’ve added extra language packs, you may see additional voices (for example, I added the Japanese language pack, so I can also choose Haruka – Desktop).

In the Magnifier section, you’ll find options for magnifying your screen — turn Magnifier on, and a floating toolbar will pop up. From this toolbar, you can magnify or reduce your screen, and choose what type of magnification view you want to see (full screen, lens, docked).

High contrast is where you can pick and tweak a high-contrast theme — choose a theme from the drop-down menu and you’ll see the theme previewed in the box below. Here, you can tweak the theme by changing the colors of each component before you hit Apply to apply the theme.

Keyboard and Mouse are exactly the same as what you’ll find in the Windows 8 PC settings menu. In the keyboard section, you can toggle the onscreen keyboard on and off, and you can also turn on useful features such as Sticky Keys and Toggle Keys (sounds a tone when you press Caps Lock, Num Lock and Scroll Lock).

In the Mouse section, you can adjust your pointer size and color, and turn on “Mouse keys,” which lets you control the mouse using your numeric keypad.

Closed captioning isn’t found in the Windows 8 PC settings menu, but it’s a handy section that lets you adjust how closed captions appear in Windows apps such as the Xbox Videos app. You can tweak the color, transparency, style, size, background color, background transparency, window color and window transparency. This won’t change how closed captions appear in online streaming services, such as Netflix and Hulu.

Finally, there’s Other options. Here, you’ll find mostly visual options — you can choose to turn off Windows’ animations, the desktop background, and you can also choose how long you want notifications to appear for (5 seconds to 5 minutes). You can also adjust the cursor thickness, in case the cursor is too slim for you to see properly.

While most people will probably never go near the Ease of Access tab, this is one section of the Windows 10 Settings menu that is pretty organized. My only issue: While all of the options in the Ease of Access tab are fairly easy to understand, there’s no direct link to the Control Panel’s Ease of Access Center. The Ease of Access Center groups settings together in simpler categories (e.g., “Use the computer without a display/optimize for blindness,” or “Use the computer without a mouse or keyboard”), so people can quickly figure out which accessibility features they actually need.