Accessibility is pretty important to us, and we want to make Windows Media Center easy to use for visually impaired folks. The default experience in Windows Media Center makes your digital media much more accessible to start with compared to Windows Media Player, iTunes or Zune -- because everything is bigger (your album art, the text, selectable items, etc.). There are some high contrast accessibility features you can turn on which make it even easier to read and navigate Windows Media Center if you are vision impaired. Get to them via Tasks > Settings > General > Visual and Sound Effects > Color Scheme. Here is what they look like.

High Contrast - White

High Contrast Black

When = Soon, but difficult to say exactly when as each OEM works on finalizing their offerings. The Windows Media Center team is working with each to make sure these make it to market as soon as possible. (Yeah, I know -- this sounds like a total non-answer -- it's really the best information I have at the moment.)

Where = Dell, Sony, Velocity Media, Toshiba and Niveus Media have announced they will be selling CableCard equipped Windows Media Center systems. Take your pick and start monitoring those OEM websites for ordering details.

I promised Ian Dixon a few days ago I would start a new series of posts here at Retrosight for end users of Windows Media Center and since the MVPs are in town getting ready to ask quite a lot of questions I thought I would kick things off a little earlier than he expects. I'm going call these posts 'Mailbag' (modeled after Aaron) and they will be totally community driven.

So...

Leave your question as a comment for this post -- I'll answer one per comment in the order in which they are posted. If you leave more than one question per comment, I'll answer your first one and ignore the rest to give everyone a chance to ask. I'll shoot for one per week, but may be more or less depending on my bandwidth and how involved the questions or answers become.

Update: I just answered the first, and had to gently wordsmith the question a little bit to post in the title. If you post a question and I wordsmith to make things clearer, and you think I changed the question in the process, post a comment on my answer post (not here) and I'll try to clarify.

[You can see this coming...] There will inevitably be some questions I probably won't be able to answer with as much detail as you wish (like 'Can you list out the entire feature set for the next version?') -- but I will make every effort to give you a meaningful answer.

What do you want to know about the Windows Media Center product or team?