Windows 11 takes some important steps forward with accessibility as Voice Access is bolstered

Windows 11 has a new preview out in the Canary channel and it makes some very useful changes on the accessibility front.

Build 26231 ushers in Voice Access for Narrator (Windows 11's screen reading tool), meaning that users can dictate text to their PC, and then have it read back to them.

Microsoft is also introducing voice commands for Narrator that include turning on the feature, and instructions to make the speed of reading faster, or to 'read the next line' or a selected piece of text.

Windows 11 build 26231 further introduces a new command for searching within the OS, allowing users to say "Search Windows for X" where X is the search term, and this will initiate said search.

On top of that, Microsoft is bringing in 'auto restart' for Voice Access. What this means is that if the feature crashes, as the name suggests, it'll automatically fire itself back up. This means that those with limited mobility can return to using it as swiftly as possible, and won't have to rely on someone else helping them to get it running again (or another assistive technology to achieve that end).

Furthermore, when a crash like this occurs, Windows 11 is making it easier for the user to report that incident, and hopefully help Microsoft to shore up the functionality to guard against it happening again.

That's the main focus of build 26231, although there are various tweaks applied to the interface here, most notably to Task Manager. Indeed, Task Manager also gets an accessibility tweak as follows: "Made multiple improvements to overall accessibility of Task Manager, including improving keyboard focus, tab navigation, text scaling, names of items read out by screen readers, and more."

So, Microsoft is applying some nifty improvements for accessibility here, which has been a continued theme with Windows 11 (and indeed Windows 10 before it), and that's good to see.