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womble -> RE: Introduction to screen readers and screen magnifiers (7/18/2007 16:05:14)
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That's a really good find Dave. I watched the screen magnifier demo one, and it's a fairly good explanation of how screen magnifiers work, particularly when they pulled back and showed the screen from more of a distance. I use LunarPlus, which is similar to ZoomText (the interface looked very familar), which has very similar options.
When I use it at work (I have a pen edition which means I can plug it into any PC and run it from the pen drive) the reaction I get from colleagues who come anywhere near the screen is "Whoah! That's weird! How do you manage with it like that?" Um, it's a lot easier than not being able to see the screen clearly...
I tend to use around 3x magnification and I also have a colour tint on as well (bright white isn't good for me). I also use a coloured cursor, and cross-hairs that make it easier for me to see the cursor/pointer, and focus highlighting, particularly if I'm inputting on databases at work. Access databases are a PITA though, at least the one I use at work because obviously very little thought's been put into the layout of the input screen and if you're tabbing between fields it gets very confusing with the focus jumping all over the screen.
Web pages it often struggles with if I try and use the voice support. Like ZoomText, it's not a full-blown screenreader, but it has voice support. Trying to use it just with the voice support though is awful. Most pages (not accessible ones), I usually give up on with it, and even accessible sites, if they're multi-columned it gets confused, and I find the easiest way is to knock of the styles and just . That's a huge problem for me at work because the idiot IT dept insist only IE6 must be used, and my Portable Firefox (which of course makes it easy to knock off stylesheets) gets blocked by their proxy server, which is one of the arguments I'm going to be raising in my quest to be able to use Firefox. I tend to use the voice support if I need to read long articles and I'm having a bad day vision-wise. If mid-sentence though it skips to a sidebar it's most frustrating.
I'm kinda weird because my vision varies greatly (I've got a weird neurological condition that affects my optic nerves, but sometimes more severely than others). Today I'm just using the screen as normal (though I have magnification built into my specs as well). Some days I use the screen magnifier, some days when I'm getting tired I switch to the voice support.
That video was right though about the importance of having a clear layout on sites. I've been using my screen magnifier for about six months now, and especially at the beginning even finding my way around familiar sites with the magnifier took some getting used to. What it didn't get across particularly was the frustration factor when you find yourself on a site with stuff all over the place and moving stuff (Flash banners - arggghhh! [:o]). When you're using a screen magnifier, everything takes longer to do because you've got to find stuff before you can read it/press it, etc. and then there's the fact that you only get things in small chunks.
I've got a copy of it somewhere at work, and it really is good - the RNIB's See It Right gives tons of useful info on producing accessible information in a variety of formats, not just the web with guidelines for best practice and practical tips, including things you don't really think about when designing normally, like paying attention to the kerning of text, spacing columns, and probably one of the most important things - using "white space" properly.
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