Windows 2000 in the context of Block diagram

A screen reader is a form of assistive technology (AT) that renders text and image content as speech or braille output. Screen readers are essential to blind people, and are also useful to people who are visually impaired, illiterate or learning-disabled. Screen readers are software applications that attempt to convey what people with normal eyesight see on a display to their users via non-visual means, like text-to-speech, sound icons, or a braille device. They do this by applying a wide variety of techniques that include, for example, interacting with dedicated accessibility APIs, using various operating system features (like inter-process communication and querying user interface properties), and employing hooking techniques.

Microsoft Windows operating systems have included the Microsoft Narrator screen reader since Windows 2000, though separate products such as Freedom Scientific's commercially available JAWS screen reader and ZoomText screen magnifier and the free and open source screen reader NVDA by NV Access are more popular for that operating system. Apple Inc.'s macOS, iOS, and tvOS include VoiceOver as a built-in screen reader, while Google's Android provides the Talkback screen reader and its ChromeOS can use ChromeVox. Similarly, Android-based devices from Amazon provide the VoiceView screen reader. There are also free and open source screen readers for Linux and Unix-like systems, such as Speakup and Orca.

Pocket PC 2000 (marketed as Pocket PC) was the first member of the Windows Mobile family of mobile operating systems that was released on April 19, 2000, and was based on Windows CE 3.0. It is the successor to the operating system aboard Palm-size PCs; backwards compatibility was retained with such Palm-size PC applications. It was mainly intended for Pocket PC devices, however several Palm-size PC devices had the ability to be updated also. Furthermore, several Pocket PC 2000 phones were released (under the name Handheld PC 2000), although Microsoft's "Smartphone" hardware platform had not yet been established at that time.

Aesthetically, Pocket PC 2000 was meant to be similar in design to the then-current Windows 98 and Windows 2000 desktop operating systems, as well as the yet-to-be-released Windows Me (which was still in development at the time of Pocket PC 2000's release). It had multiple built-in applications, many of them similarly branded to match their desktop counterparts, such as Microsoft Reader, Microsoft Money, Pocket Internet Explorer, and Windows Media Player. A version of Microsoft Office called Pocket Office was also bundled and included Pocket Word, Pocket Excel and Pocket Outlook. Notes, a note-taking app saw its first release and would be supported by most later versions of Windows Mobile.