Accessibility help! Visual impairment...

Mainframeguy

Debiant by way of Ubuntu
Joined
29 Aug 2002
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3,763
Hi

One of my latest pet projects is trying to sort a laptop for my old man.

Now he is 75 this year (if he ever sends me an email I'll count it as mission succeeded!) had lost all sight in one eye and with glaucoma has limited vision in the other.... Although I have a highly IT literate friend with more limited vision I've seen way audio assists work and know that is a guaranteed fail.

Just tried the ORCA assist under ubuntu and not much cop there, but maybe something was borked cause I was playing about with screen res.

Not restricted to linux based - could reinstall XP.... Hence posting here. One thought of mine is to keep it simple and make the control scroll "stick" - a how to on that would be great.

Or maybe one of the browsers has even superior facilities?

All help and suggestions appreciated...
 
There is a magnifyer in windows that follows the mouse pointer and makes things big. You could try that and see if the increased size makes it easier to discern text.
 
that's just what I meant by getting control scroll to stick...

which I have found is done best by no squint for firefox.... probably not going to be offering him IE on ubuntu :p
 
Depending on additional uses, you can look into the dragon suite. It is designed to help visually impaired people with computer usage.
 
Opera has a toggle in the right hand bottom corner, that will let you adjust the size to where he is able to read. Once it is set, he will be able to browse any site at that viewing level. Not sure if this helps, but it is worth a shot
 
Depending on additional uses, you can look into the dragon suite. It is designed to help visually impaired people with computer usage.

is that M$ or Linux? Was amazed that although there are fora galore like BLINUX there is no accessibility oriented distro... the closest to that is Ubuntu, but not really, just means it has the most services :(
 
bit disappointed at osnn "life signs" on this thread...

but since posting have set up the Duron 800 with XP and 288MB ram (it runs about the right speed for my father, trust me ;) ) and also have acquired and installed OSX to a G4 on my desk...

So I have a specific question - the Mac has a pretty simple point and click ZOOM you can turn on and off. I did not immediately find this within the accessibility options for XP. Does such a facility exist (built in) and I missed it? Or is there a plug in or add on tool that will do it? Needs to be system wide and not just for the browser, I found plenty for firefox etc, but that may confuse him if he delves further afield or attempts email.

I still have a window of opportunity to switch him to mac maybe, because his broadband has yet to be sorted out - and of course I'll look into this myself, but thought I'd ask here first.

[edit] DOH! It's an extra tool under accessibility options (Magnifier), for some reason I thought it would feature in the general setup options from control panel and not be a separate program in it's own right.... I think I'll hang onto that G4 [/edit]
 
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Accessibility on Mac OS X has been ahead of that on Windows for a while now. I had a friend of mine who was blind (as in could not see at all) use a Mac based on just the speech engine that it came with and the accessibility features. He used to talk about the OS and how he loved it when he first "saw" how it worked. He used to build entire presentations in Keynote that looked fantastic (visually), as well as write up huge papers with proper styling and proper formatting. It was absolutely amazing. At the time he had owned his Mac for less than a year, and he said he was enjoying it much more than Windows.

Just something to keep in mind.
 
thanks X - a large part of my consideration has to be that the voice/sound aspects are unlikely to be used in any seriousness and also that the machine may be supported by anyone, which I cannot help but think means M$ is basically the WTG... Also he has that now and seems content to stick with it, although proper useage will not begin until he gets online... I shall likely have to make a trip down whenever the ISP delivers the hardware. Maybe it'll be in time for silver surfer day here on the fifteenth of May ;)
 

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