Essential
Free and Low Cost Assistive Technology
Free and
lower cost Screen magnifiers
Low Cost
Commercial Option – Lightning
Commercial
Magnifiers – Demo Options
Using the
Windows Accessibility Options - High Contrast
Applying
Screen Magnification via Display Resolutions and Display Appearances
This
page is provided with the caveat that I no longer really use screen magnifiers
though I used Magic and ZoomText for many years. The advice I provide here is based on
experience that is a few years old. I am willing to update these pages based on
others experience. As usual email me on low_vision_survival@yahoo.co.uk
to make any updates or suggestions. .
John Copley has kindly
sent me a review of an important freeware screen magnifier called Desktop Zoom. It seems
likely that desktop Zoom is the most comprehensive freeware solution out there.
Again let me know if you think different.
Click here to read John Copley's review and link to download page
There
is a full featured magnifying product called Lightning which I believed was
Freeware but this appears to be a commercial product now. This is a partner application to Thunder and
appears to be still the cheapest commercial application at £116. I have never used Lightning but the feature
list appears nevertheless to contain nearly all the things I used more expensive
screen magnifiers to achieve in the past.
These features include colour contrast control, inverting colours and so
on. The only feature that appears to be missing is that magnification appears
to be rather crude at from 2 to 30 times power. In practice I used to find that
for my eyesight the important magnifications were 1.25, 1.5 and 1.75. These
smaller step magnification increments do not appear in the feature list. However Lightning is rather less than half
the cost of its rivals. For this alone
this must be applauded. Further details are on http://www.screenreader.co.uk/shop.php?shopcatid=2
I
must confess I have not really found freeware magnifiers particularly useful.
Most of them seem to rely upon a lens approach which I found confusing to use.
. This review page at http://www.download32.com/magnify-i32298.html
appears to be the most comprehensive summary of the free options for people who
want to seek freeware magnification help. The other free option is of course
the limited inbuilt magnifier option that comes with Windows. You can find this
buried in the Programs menu on the Start Menu. You need to go first of all to
Accessories and then Accessibility.
You
can also put off a purchase of a commercial magnifier for a time with Zoomtext
which I believe will work for a month in an unrestricted demo mode. The demo version appears to be available
from http://www.independentliving.com/prodinfo.asp?number=DEMO11
The
Freedom scientific screen magnifier, Magic appears like Jaws, to have an
unlimited demo mode lasting 40 minutes. A Google search revealed the following
link for a Magic demo. http://www.freedomscientific.com/downloads/magic/magic11-downloads.aspfo
Remember
that with sufficient training and experience with a screen reader there is
really very little that you need a magnifier for. If you have decreasing sight
like me it can be very liberating to move over completely to a screen reading
system. You know that, in this area at least, your impairment can no longer
hurt you. No matter how bad your eyes get you can use the PC, if necessary
without a monitor at all! You may be able to use just the demo version of Magic
to support your transition to a free screen reading
based solution as described above. If you do move to a screen reading solution remember
to join the jaws User and? Blind Computing Mailing lists. Over the weeks these
lists will help you learn the hundreds of keyboard short cuts and techniques
you will need to learn.
Windows have
some very useful inbuilt accessibility options for people with low vision.
Perhaps the most useful is the high contrast colours setting. High contrast
settings allow even screen reader users to get a degree of feedback from the
screen. Many people with retina damage will find that an inverted colour scheme
will avoid the glare associated with normal screen colours. White text on a dark background is much
easier to see than black on a white or grey background. Windows sorts out font
control to make sure that documents print out normally even where text is shown
as white on black.
The normal way
to access High Contrast is to navigate to the Accessibility application in
control Panel. Here you will find a display tab under which you will find a
button to set up options for High contrast. You can toggle a setting to set up
High Contrast on a shortcut key of Alt-shift and Print Screen.
Here I am
grateful to John Copley who has emailed me to talk
about possible problems setting up the keyboard high contrast toggle on XP.
“We tried to set the
toggle facility on but bizarrely the Accessibility
Options icon was missing from the Control Panel window. I did a
Search for.cpl files and found assess.cpl in a Service Pack folder
(But not in the System32 folder). I executed the one I
found and was
Able to set the toggle facility on. From being almost
impossible to
Use my wife's
laptop may now get quite a lot of my attention.
“
John’s email has
reminded me that, at installation, not all Windows components are necessarily
installed. Another way to achieve what John achieved would probably to go to
Add Remove Programs in Control Panel and select the option to add Windows
components. I personally have not tried this.
If you are
using high contrast colours on the Internet you will have to enter the
accessibility options of internet Explorer and tell it to ignore colours
specified on web pages. Accessibility options can be found under the Tools and
then Options menu. There is a similar setting in FireFox preferences.
Unfortunately
and indeed, oddly, there is an incompatibility between the Windows high
Contrast settings and the Jaws Screen Reader. High Contrast settings tend to confuse
Jaws and it can start behaving very oddly with for example multiple read outs
of text on the screen. There is a
solution to this but it is one that is very hard for people with low vision can
implement. The solution is to manually edit the high contrast colour settings
and remove all instances of the colour black and replace this with dark blue.
At the same time you should replace the default dark highlight colour with an
easier to see colour such as red. In order to assist with this I have provided
a link below to a high contrast colour scheme which I have been using
successfully with Jaws for years.
1. Before
you apply this scheme make sure you
save your current scheme as something like original so that you can go back to
your current setup. To do this goes to your Display settings in Control Panel.
I always save my themes in an easy to find location such as My Documents so
that they can be easily retrieved and applied.
2. Download
the scheme from the link below. Save it somewhere you will find it easy to
locate in Explorer or the Desktop.
3. Navigate to
the downloaded scheme and press enter.
4. The display properties dialogue box will come
up. Now simply press enter again to
apply the new colour scheme and you are done.
Click here to download a Jaws Compatible High Contrast Theme
A further
option to provide screen magnification is to reduce the resolution in display
setting. Go to Control Panel and settings. There should be a slider which
allows you to reduce resolution and increase the size of fonts and window
elements. Most graphics cards will now only allow you to reduce resolution to
800 by 600. If you are lucky there may be still an option to reduce to 640 by
480. There may be problems with windows not working properly in these
resolutions with buttons not appearing on the screen in some programs as the
window becomes literally too big to fit on the screen. Still this might be a
survival option for someone who still wants to rely upon sight and does not
have access to a commercial magnifier. In addition to these resolution options
there are appearance schemes which give not only high contrast but larger fonts
as well. Remember if you are using Jaws
you will have to remove any black background in these schemes and replace it
with something like dark blue. With low resolution and large font schemes you
can apply quite a useful level of magnification to your PC. Of course even more
magnification can be achieved by increasing the font size you are using in your
word processor or spreadsheet etc.
The bane of my
life before I moved onto commercial assistive technology was finding the mouse
cursor. Windows provides an extra large
cursor set but in all honesty they were not that visible. Other options
included mouse trails to increase visibility but again were not enough for me.
In order to overcome this problem I designed some cursors to use for myself. An
oddity of these cursors is that the freeware program that I used to design them
was actually intended to create animated cursors. The cursors I designed are
therefore with an ANI file type which would normally mean an animated cursor.
These cursors are not however animated. They are however quite big, I am not sure
that there are any bigger around that you can use unamended
in the normal windows cursor configuration.
I cannot see these cursors now so some of them may be incomplete or
untidy. One or two of them may be usable
still though. I have zipped them into a file for those who have a little sight
but want the biggest possible mouse cursor.
I suspect that david.ani is actually the one I
used to use and that the others may be development versions. Any body can use
or edit these but if you think you have improved them then please email me a
copy on low_vision_survival@yahoo.co.uk and I will
post them here also.
You need to
download the zip file below.
Unzip the
files and copy them into your Cursors folder in your Windows directory.
Now go to the
Mouse applet in Control Panel and select the pointers by pressing control tab.
Tab pass the scheme menu and you will arrive at the list of
pointers.
Once the
normal pointer is selected tab to the browse button and then selects one of
these files to install these and check out whether it does the job for you. As
I say David.ani is probably the best version.
Click here to download big cursors in a zip file
This
page was last updated on Saturday, 20 June 2009.