Windows Low Vision: Color

Did you know that we can customize the color settings on our Window's computer to make it easier to see? Hi, I'm Vikki Vaughan and today, we'll explore how to personalize Windows color settings to suit our visual needs.

Let's start off by moving to our desktop. We'll use our keyboard shortcut, Windows and the letter D for desktop, to land on the desktop from anywhere on our computer. Here, we right click on any blank spot on the desktop. If you're a shortcut fan like me, you can use the keyboard shortcut of Shift and F10 to open a menu without your mouse.

You might hear this menu called a Context menu. It contains shortcuts that help us use our computer more efficiently. We have a couple of choices to get to the Personalize menu. We can either use our mouse pointer to select Personalize, or we can press the keyboard shortcut, R. A helpful hint, think of the phrase "Colors of the rainbow."

Let's select Colors in the left pane. When we select this setting, the options in the right pane change to controls for customizing our computers color modes. Our first control in the right pane is a dropdown box labeled "Choose your colors". We'll use our mouse pointer to view our options. We can use our mouse pointer or arrow keys to select from light, dark, or custom.

As we make our selection the preview window above our controls gives us a quick look at each option. The light color changes our background, start menu, task bar, and action center to a lighter color scheme. In our preview window above, we see the color has changed in our title bars and window borders.

Below our dropdown box we see a toggle switch labeled "Transparency effects". Let's use the mouse pointer to select the transparency toggle switch to turn on and off transparency shading. This setting allows our desktop wallpaper to be visible through a translucent task bar, start menu, and action center. This option can be useful for those of us who prefer to see the shading of the background in those parts of our screen. For some of us, this option provides a greater contrast. If we prefer to turn it off, we just select the button again.

The color setting also lets us choose a customized accent color from a color palette below. We have a row of our recently selected colors and when we scroll or move down, we see the full color palette. We can also choose a custom color by selecting this button labeled "Custom color". Let's try out one of these colors.

We'll use our mouse pointer to click on a color. We can change the shade by clicking on the slider bar and dragging it to the left or right. To darken the shade we click and drag it to the left. To make the color a lighter shade, we click and drag it to the right. Once we've selected our accent color, we select the Done button to close our custom palette.

Moving down to the bottom of our page, we find more contrast controls. There are a couple of check boxes. For the light color scheme, only the last option is available to us. It lets us choose to apply the accent color to our title bars and window borders. We can select the color that gives us the highest contrast. We check or uncheck it with our mouse pointer or by pressing our space bar.

Many of us with light sensitivity prefer a darker color scheme. Let's move back up to our color dropdown box and explore the dark option. Wow, that's quite a change, isn't it? We immediately see a dark background with white letters. Our accent colors have stayed the same, but we can customize them in the dark mode just as we did in the light mode. There's one difference with this option.

When we move to the bottom, we see that we can select the start, task bar, and action center checkbox. This lets us apply our accent colors to these elements to add a bit more contrast. Let's try it out. We'll use our mouse pointer to check the box. Moving up, we have a look at our last color option, "Custom."

Beneath our dropdown box we see several new controls. Let's press our Tab key to move to the first control. Our radio button. Here we can choose either light or dark mode for our Windows mode. We can use either our mouse pointer or press the space bar to select this option. If we prefer the dark mode, we tab to the next radio button. This control lets us select our app color. As with our previous control, we select it with our mouse pointer or the space bar. As with our other color options, custom allows us to select our transparency mode and pick our accent color. Finally, as with the light option, we can check the final check box to apply our accent to our title bars and window borders.

In today's workshop, we explored several color options to customize the appearance of our computer. I'm Vikki Vaughan, and I thank you for joining me.