What is "Windows 10 ease of access tools" ?
Ease of access tools are things like the screen magnifier to help with those with sight problems, Windows text-to-speech for those who cannot read smaller text effectively, closed captioning and audio mode settings to help with those hard-of-hearing, and other things such as pointer size, icon size, screen strobe light effects for notification awareness, UI high-contrast modes, and speech, keyboard, and mouse aids for those with physical or capability disabilities.
Ease of access tools can be found in the control panel, or in the Windows Settings dialogue. Basically, these are essential tools for those who are disabled or impaired in some way. They make their lives easier. Microsoft decided to extend the upgrade time for people that need these tools to operate their OS.
I remember reading somewhere that you must upgrade to Win8 first as a stepping stone before upgrading to 10. Once you have upgraded to Win10, you can do a fresh install of Win10 if you prefer.
Perhaps it's a good idea to extract your current key first, although I rolled back the Win10 installation to Win81 about six times before I was happy and never ran in to issues with product keys. Not sure how MS manages this. It just works
This is not the case for most people. You must be using a machine running 7 or higher. I upgraded my laptop from Windows 7 to Windows 10 without any problems without needing to upgrade to 8 or 8.1 as a stepping stone. You should not need to iterate your upgrades, as doing so would require buying a Windows 8 key anyway. That would circumvent the "free" -ness of the Windows 10 upgrade.
UPDATE:
Unfortunately, it looks like Microsoft realized they had left their ease-of-access update on-line far beyond the end-date, and have stopped supporting the free upgrade. The old website they had setup can be reached through their development blog at this link, but it appears it no longer provides what we're looking for
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ac...ge-for-people-who-use-assistive-technologies/
I am sorry if you were banking on this being available still. I had used this method about a year ago and that had been long after they were supposed to stop supporting the free upgrade for ease-of-access users, so I had figured the back door was still relevant.
