The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update Feature Focus
by Brett Howse on November 10, 2017 8:00 AM ESTInteraction Updates: Accessibility and more
The Fall Creators Update also brings some interesting new developments in the interaction with Windows itself. There’s now the ability to control Windows 10 with your eyes, using Eye Control beta, a much improved screen reader, and improved dictation support, all in an effort to make Windows more accessible.
Eye Control
If anyone has had a chance to try out a system with the Tobii Eye Tracker, it’s a very interesting camera system that can accurately track your eyes, displaying exactly where you are looking. This has been leveraged on gaming PCs as not only a way to allow faster interactions, but for training as well, since you can review your footage and see where you were looking during the game. Microsoft has added this technology support into Windows to allow people with disabilities to operate an onscreen mouse, keyboard, and text-to-speech, using their eyes.
Narrator
For visually impaired people, Narrator has been improved using Microsoft Cognitive Services, meaning the Narrator program can generate image descriptions for images that are not accompanied by text.
Dictation
Dictation has also been improved with modern speech recognition services, which are cloud based, much like digital personal assistants, and the accuracy of the speech recognition should be improved quite a bit.
Color Filters
Color vision deficiency, or color blindness, is a condition that affects many people. With the Fall Creators Update, Microsoft has added the ability to apply filters to Windows to improve the experience of using a computer for people that suffer from this condition. They’ve added five filters to cover the various types of color blindness.
Swipe Keyboard
Even though Windows 10 Mobile always had a great swipe keyboard, the desktop OS was always saddled with a hunt and peck touch based keyboard. With the Fall Creators Update, you can now choose the swipe keyboard when in touch mode by pressing the keyboard icon in the top left of the touch keyboard. The new Swipe keyboard is practically identical to the Windows 10 Mobile one, and that’s not a bad thing. It has word prediction as well. It does have a drawback in that it is size constrained, so it’s a bit odd looking on a larger display, but should be an improvement over the original keyboard to anyone that prefers a swipe style, which should be everyone by this point.
Emoji Picker
If you love Emoji, there’s a new Emoji picker as well, which can be accessed with Win + Period or Semicolon.
However, it’s currently only available to people with their region set to the USA, which is unfortunately an incredibly common problem for users outside of the USA, such as myself. Even though Microsoft is a global company, then tend to region restrict random things for no apparent reason, and this is one of them.
Find My Pen
Pen interaction has been a feature that Microsoft has promoted for some time, however losing your pen can be a bit of a pain. To help with lost pens, Windows 10 will now track your pen based on where it was used with your PC last. Pens don’t have built-in GPS, unlike phones, or other devices, so this is the best compromise available. With the cost of a digital pen being what it is, even helping once will make this feature worth it.
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prophet001 - Monday, November 13, 2017 - link
*emddrіver - Monday, November 13, 2017 - link
Facebook, Google, or Amazon also do it but lets be real, how can they monetize on my data? Will a company just suddenly guess what I like and dislike on FB? Do I find search results "adjusted" to my preference? Does Amazon give me different prices and offers than others? Idiocy!Plus, there's no sensitive data about me on my phone but I have all kinds of stuff in my computer like scans of important documents, CVs, etc. No way I let M$ have that.
Screw you - Wednesday, November 15, 2017 - link
As if the average customer will actually ever check certificate information. Most don't even know what a certificate is...And your request concerning firewall protection would be for a very small minority of paranoid techno-geeks who represent an insignificant and small portion of the Windows using population... Enacting a default firewall rule to block everything would make the Windows experience cumbersome and inefficient for MOST users. Things work just fine as they are right now... You really need to get over yourself Mr. Fort Knox.edzieba - Friday, November 10, 2017 - link
It's not going to make it 'less safe' either. Two and a half years after release, and not a single shred of evidence has been uncovered of Microsoft sending your files to themselves. And you can bet security researchers have been looking very closely too.shaikhsimraan - Sunday, November 12, 2017 - link
FRP Bypass APK: https://www.yourtechnocrat.com/frp-bypass-apk/Mo3tasm - Friday, November 10, 2017 - link
Fall creator update is certainly the best Win10 update, features are reasonably polished and the build is just a lot more stable...That being said, Win10 itself is bad.. slower than Win7 or even Win8.1 (and an order of magnitude than any Linux distro), you're forced to use the system in a way that you don't necessarily like, and updates are just shoved up the ass...
ddriver - Friday, November 10, 2017 - link
Yeah, good old w7 is still the best, as long as you keep close attention to what updates you are installing.Unfortunately, m$ took measures against the selective installation of updates, and recently releases those "update bundles", each of which contains all the updates and you definitely don't want on your machine, such as telemetry.
Additionally, m$ colluded with hardware vendors to omit support for w7 from their latest hardware driver packages. Granted, some might actually work, but it is usually hacky and not 100% operational.
Really revolting, heinous, despicable behavior. Grade A scumbags...
Ratman6161 - Friday, November 10, 2017 - link
Here is the other side of the coin. The vast majority of exploits which make it into the news are exploiting know things that only work on systems that have not installed updates. Wannacry was a perfect example.Bullwinkle-J-Moose - Saturday, December 23, 2017 - link
Bad example Ratman!Wannacry had no effect on Windows XP-SP2 with no Microsoft Updates, only SP3 was affected
Once Microsoft updates yer box, NSA exploits work again like magic
Mo3tasm - Friday, November 10, 2017 - link
I suspect it also has to do with frequent updates, developers can get lazy all they want when they must fix bugs or optimize performance, because they can always do it "next month"..Back in the days when you could push major code changes only once per version they had to work really hard to perfect every line of code.