I don’t want to go off on a rant here, but there is one component of Windows XP that was written so badly, it occasionally ruins my gaming experience. The most frustrating feature of any operating system that I can recall using is, without a doubt, Accessibility Options.
The Accessibility Options make it possible for people who have impaired vision, hearing, or motor skills to use Windows like everyone else. I commend Microsoft for making these options available. Unfortunately, they designed the options so badly that able bodied people are forever turning them on by accident!
So, there I was, playing Extreme Pinball in DOSBox, a game in which the Shift keys control the paddles. Well, you know what happens when you press the Shift key five times in a row, right? StickyKeys pops up and freezes your game!
The first time this ever happened to me, I went into Accessibility Options and unchecked “Use StickyKeys”. Well guess what? That doesn’t turn it off. Wait, it doesn’t? You heard me.
No, merely specifying that you don’t want to use StickyKeys doesn’t make that pesky feature go away. You have to press the “Settings” button to learn that the shortcut for that service (the one you just turned off) is pressing Shift five times, and you have to uncheck “Use shortcut” to make it actually go away.
That’s not so bad, right? If only StickyKeys’ unintuitive options were the worst of Accessibility Options’ problems. You see, I made the mistake of choosing Accessibility Wizard from the Start Menu when I wanted to change my StickyKeys settings. I don’t know what I did in there, but I accidentally shrunk the Active Title Bar size to 18. Contrary to the usual intent of Accessibility Options, this made the titles of my open windows more difficult to read. I went back into the wizard and unchecked the option to change font sizes, and at the end of the wizard it told me that I hadn’t made any changes. Haven’t made any changes? Remember that option that was checked that I unchecked?
Well, I know a thing or two about computers, so I went into my Display Settings, selected Advanced in the Appearance tab, and Active Title Bar from the drop down menu. It was here that I saw that the size was set to 18. Now if only I knew what size it was supposed to be! Finally I smartened up and went into the Control Panel and opened Accessibility Options, where I assumed that I would find an option to “Restore Defaults” or, better yet, “Disable Accessibility Options”. No such luck. What? No, I’m sorry, but what??? Have you ever heard of a Windows component that can change the way you interact with your operating system and ultimately determine whether you can see, hear, and use your computer, that doesn’t have an option to undo your changes? You can accidentally make your computer unusable and there’s no way to restore the defaults? Okay, enough of this piece of crap program. It’s time to get serious: I’m going into Services!
So, I went into the list of Windows Services, and guess what? Accessibility Options is not a service, so you can forget about disabling it that way. Again, I don’t understand. There’s no checkbox to disable the feature, and it isn’t a service that can be disabled. In the days of Windows 98/Me, you could choose whether or not to install Accessibility Options during installation, and if you changed your mind you could always add or remove it later using Add/Remove Windows Components in the Control Panel. Now you have no choice! It’s just this sinister program that lurks beneath the surface of Windows and holds the potential to ruin your Windows experience at any time. You have to have it; you can’t remove it or turn it off. Fonts can become too big, too small, you can have visual indicators every time your computer makes a noise, your keyboard can behave differently, and there are a host of other things that can happen to you that would be great if you actually wanted or needed Accessibility Options in order to use Windows.
As I said, this is the greatest service in the world if you have a disability. For those of us who don’t, why isn’t there an option to undo changes or turn the service off? For that matter, what happens if a person who needs Accessibility Options accidentally changes or turns something off? There isn’t an option to undo your changes, so if you have a disability and turn off an accessibility option that you need, you’re up the creek without a paddle! I was just playing a game of pinball and now I can no longer use my computer the way I like. How the hell did this happen? Okay, this has gone on long enough. Time to send the most frustrating feature of Windows back to hell.
A Google search finally led me to this page: MSFN’s Unattended Windows : Completely disable accessibility options. What you’ll see is several dozen lines of “code” to edit your Registry to permanently disable Accessibility Options so that you can no longer accidentally turn them on. I must absolutely caution that making changes to your Registry can be dangerous and should only be performed by users who know what they’re doing. If you’re comfortable changing your Registry options, you can copy and paste the code into a text file and save it with a .reg extension. Now merely run the Registry file that you’ve created and reboot.
The Active Title Bar wasn’t actually fixed, but I’m grateful to finally be free of that invasive little program that has interfered with so many of my gaming sessions. Going back to the Display options, I changed the Appearance from Windows XP style to Windows Classic style and then changed it back, which restored the size to 25, which I now know is the size I wanted it to be when it somehow got changed to 18.
To recap, I was playing a quick game of Extreme Pinball, and by pressing the left paddle too many times in a row, I invoked a monster that changed my Accessibility Options so that my system was no longer accessible. This problem is so pervasive that someone actually posted a Registry fix to disable the service. Why didn’t Microsoft do that? Why isn’t there an option to undo changes, restore defaults, or just turn the damned thing off?
Microsoft: get a clue. This is the most half-assed Windows component I’ve ever used, and I never intended to use it in the first place. Fix your @&*$ing Accessibility Options!