By just looking at a range of Microsoft products starting with Windows, the company’s strong focus on providing a high level of accessibility for users becomes extremely clear. However, the Redmond giant is now doing more, and it is offering a new project designed to enable third-party developers to make their software more accessible to vision-impaired people. The Technical Preview of Digital Lens is now available for download free of charge from Microsoft.

The software giant underlines that UI designers and developers can take advantage of the new tool in order to view their visual designs in the same manner as vision-impaired users. Obviously, designers and developers can subsequently take the necessary actions to optimize the User Interfaces for their products in order to be as accessible as possible.

“Digital Lens was designed with the mission to simplify the process of finding problems that would make your UI less accessible to users with impaired vision. It provides UI designers and developers the tools to view the visual design as it would be seen by vision impaired users. By emulating common impaired vision conditions, Digital Lens users are able to identify issues in the UI and fix them before the product is released - with Digital Lens you are able to design a more accessible product,” Microsoft stated.

Developed by the Microsoft Israel R&D Center Innovation Labs, Digital Lens is designed to work only with the 32-bit (x86) version of Windows 7. At the same time, devs will need to have the Windows Aero theme enabled. “Digital Lens currently supports the following filters: Green-Red – Simulates green & red color blindness; Yellow-Blue - Simulates yellow & blue color blindness; Black-White – Simulates full color blindness; Blur - Simulates blurry vision; Dazzle – Simulates glare,” Microsoft added.

Digital Lens is available for download here.