Disabling Windows accessibility shortcuts

Introduction

Microsoft Windows has an excellent feature called accessibility. In order to toggle this feature, Windows has built-in shortcuts using the RIGHT-SHIFT key. Unfortunately, those shortcuts are sometime annoying (if you maintain the RIGHT-SHIFT key pressed while thinking about your next keystroke, an unwanted pop-up appears) and even can cause deadlocks (if using a firewall such as ZoneAlarm, when maintaining the RIGHT-SHIFT key for 8 seconds, a ZoneAlarm pop-up appears, but the keyboard and mouse are locked, so you have no other solution than hitting the OFF switch, losing your work).

Hopefully, Windows has a (complex) API for this feature. So I developped a small program to enable/disable accessibility shortcuts.

Usage

shortcuts.exe is a command-line program.

enter "shortcut.exe" or "shortcut.exe 0" to disable accessibility shortcuts.

enter "shortcuts.exe 1" to re-enable them.

You typically put shortcuts.exe in your startup folder so that it is executed at startup.

NOTA: Shortcuts can't be disabled if accessibility keys are active.

Download

The source is here . It compiles with MinGW, but I suspect that it can be compiled also with VC.

The executable is there.

Legalese

Copyright (C) 2006 Michel Gouget.
This software provided as is, without any warranty of any kind.

This program is free software, according to the GPL.

Enjoy!
michel HAT gouget DOTT org