Q: Windows 10 has some color issues that make it hard for me to see things on the screen. My son says my best option is to use "High Contrast," which changes the screen colors to make them more discernible, but I don't find it that useful. I also have a hard time seeing highlighted items in programs such as Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet. What can I do?
Paul Wilson, Maple Grove
A: You may be dealing with two different visual issues: High-contrast screen colors (that are supposed to improve screen visibility) and highlighting (which identifies the file or text you're working with.) Both can be improved.
The Windows 10 High Contrast feature rearranges the screen's color scheme to make it easier to distinguish between objects. The idea is to make it easier to navigate the screen and to improve the visibility of ordinary text, hyperlinks or text that you've "defined" so that you can copy, change or delete it.
But if you don't care for the preset color combinations Microsoft offers you (they are called "themes"), you can customize the color combinations to suit your vision needs (see tinyurl.com/39c8e97x).
Or, if you think High Contrast doesn't help much, there's an alternate way to change screen colors. The Windows 10 Color Filters (see tinyurl.com/tst4y4vw) can modify screen colors or compensate for different types of color blindness.
Highlighting is a key part of Windows. It can help you see a file you want to open, text you want to modify or text that's more easily viewed in a different color scheme.
But highlighting sometimes stops working if you magnify text on the screen to 125% of original size (a reasonable thing to do if you have vision issues.) Highlighting also can fail after a Windows 10 update or when the PC "awakens" from the power-saving "sleep" or "hibernate" modes.
