FW: Screen Magnifier

[Ian Pascoe]

Hi

What you must remember here is that technologically speaking Windows is a number of years in front of Linux, although it is catching up quite smartly.

I am a ZoomText user and understand that when you have a series of features that you are used to it is very difficult to go backwards in functionality.  But the difference is that here you can influence the way things go a lot more easily than for the commercially orientated Windows products.

>From the list of differences you mention, I think from a personal viewpoint I would like to get the full screen magnification sorted so that you don't need to hack it to make it work, and also the ability to change between themes on the fly.  The rest of the differences can wait.  I just want to be able to either enlarge the screen to a size and colour so I can read it, or sit back and listen to a document being read back to me.

Anything over and above this is icing on the proverbial cake.

But of course being visually impaired is only one set of disabilities that is trying to be addressed.

Of course the other major problem is to get projects and developers to incorporate the necessary glue to make their apps accessabile.  But that, as they say, is another story.

Ian

-----Original Message-----
From: ubuntu-accessibility-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com
[mailto:ubuntu-accessibility-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com]On Behalf Of
Veli-Pekka Tätilä
Sent: 07 December 2006 20:57
To: ubuntu-accessibility at lists.ubuntu.com
Subject: Re: Screen Magnifier


Hi,
I'm a SUpernova user myself and have so far yet to find anything comparable 
in LInux or OS X. There are five big things that many of these magnifiers 
don't have, which are part of Supernova:
1. The thing is able to redraw true type fonts larger on the fly (image 
smoothing). So if you zoom in, the fonts won't pixelate or blur at all.
2. Fractional magnification values such as 1.5 x are supported. X and Y 
magnification may be adjusted independently, if desired.
3. You can spawn multiple magnified areas to monitor particular portions of 
the screen e.g. the status bar (hooked areas).
4. When the mouse is tracked, it starts scrolling before the pointer hits 
the edge of the magnified viewport (mouse frame). What this boils down to is 
that the mouse is easier to see as it moves in a smallish area in the center 
of the screen unless you hit the physical screen edge.
5. Supernova is able to highlight the different points of focus (rectangle, 
pointer, caret) in a user specified way using large arrows, boxes, color 
tinting and so on (focus highlighting).
6. it let's you switch colors on the fly based on the color circle and 
contrast, tints (of foreground and background) or exact color replacements 
(color changer).

I'm not trying to advertise SN here. I'm just saying that many of the free 
magnifiers have a long way to go to get even close to the functionality of 
Supernova or Zoom Text. Personally I would find all of these features very 
useful and use most of them on a daily basis in Windows despite being 
primarily a speech user. I would very much like to see them added to Linux 
magnifiers, too.

Too bad my current virtual PC based setup doesn't have enough horse power to 
handle magnification properly. The only physical machine I could dedicate to 
LInux would be a 300 MHz Celeron with 128 MB RAM. I guess Gnome is slow as 
tar, to directly translate a Finnish saying, on such a system.

-- 
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila at mail.student.oulu.fi)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/

Øyvind Lode wrote:
> Instead of magnifying just a portion of the screen it magnifies the
> whole screen/desktop in real-time.
>
> I'm now using Supernova on Windows, I have fullscreen magnification on
> and the magnification Level is 14x which is quite high.
> If I move the mouse to the upper left of the screen I can only see the
> title bar "Compose:" and beneath that I see the File, Edit, View and
> just below that I see the Send and Contact buttons in Thundeerbird.
> To see the rest I have to move the mouse around.
> You may say what I see on my screen is about 14 times bigger than what
> you see because you probably dont need magnification to read text on
> your computer. 


-- 
Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list
Ubuntu-accessibility at lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility