I have what may seem like a strange question, however I believe I have identified a real need for something like this and would like to know A. If anyone else has suggestions, or B. if anyone has crossed this bridge and has pointers to products that may already provide function like this.
I work with a company that employs and assists a large number of visually impaired people. There are a multitude of choices for assisting software inside the OS that does everything from read your email to navigate windows....
The issue is that when a computer is shutting down and it is at that screen installing updates X of X, please do not power down or turn off your computer...
Someone who cannot see, will eventually declare that their computer is hung and take the normal remediation steps which is shut it off or power it down!
When I took this position I thought this may have been a bad image from the last admin that kept leading to computers in boot repair, and with random error associated with failing updates. It appears the cause is that end users are doing just this.
So would I would like to do is perhaps detect this condition and make it do a periodic system beep or something to indicate it is in this state, and that they should not consider it hung / in need of power down until the beeping has ceased for x seconds or something like that.
Any one have any suggestions on where to start? (Or where this question would be better asked?)
You could modify the PSWindowsUpdate scripts to use the Windows Speech feature before updates are installed, raising the volume to the desired level and informing the user update installation is about to occur, and that they should not shut down their computer. You would then create a group policy scheduled task to run the installation script as often as desired.