Windows Low Vision: Fonts

Some computer fonts can be challenging for those of us with visual impairments. If the font is too busy or cluttered, it can be hard to read, especially when magnified. Thankfully, Windows makes it easy to customize our fonts to fit our visual needs. Let's find out how.

From anywhere on our computer, let's press the Windows key and the letter D to move to the desktop. We'll open the context menu by either right-clicking on any blank spot on the desktop or by using the keyboard shortcut shift and F10. This opens a menu.

You might hear this mean you called a context menu. It contains shortcuts that help us use our computer more efficiently. We'll select personalize from the list. We can do that with our mouse pointer or press the letter R as in right for me. This opens our Setting window where we'll use our mouse pointer to select fonts in the left pane.

We have several options for personalizing our font. We can drag and drop font files that we've stored in File Explorer or on our desktop. We also have a link to the Microsoft store, where we can get other fonts.

Moving down our page, we see examples of free fonts that are already available on our computer. I really like that we have a sample for each font. It gives us a chance to see if a particular font will work for us. As we can see, there are many choices available. When we're ready to try a font, we use the mouse pointer to select our desired font.

A new window opens up with a cool feature. We use this slider bar to change the font size. We can also type a few words in this preview window to get a better idea if this font is the one we want to check out.

Moving down the page, we see different text attributes we can use with certain font styles. Many of them are old friends like bold and italic. When we want to go back to our font page, we select the left arrow in the top-left corner. If we know the name of a certain font that we're looking for, we can type it into this search edit field. It will search through all of the fonts that are already installed on our computer.

Most programs like Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint include fonts that are automatically installed when we install the program. For those of us with low vision, the easiest fonts to see are Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, Gotham, and APHont.

APHont is font that is designed especially for low-vision users. It was created by the American Printing House for the Blind. Qualified users can download it for free. Check out the resources below for a link to the download. In today's workshop, we explored how to customize fonts in our settings. I'm Vikki Vaughan, and I thank you for joining me.