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One of our users who is dealing with severe visual impairment relies on a combination of zoomtext on her PC and an IPAD (the pinch to zoom function, large icons, and easy navigation make the ipad a good option). The ZoomText application is pricey but does help a lot, http://www.aisquared.com/produ...

As an engineer of 30+ years who has recently (ine the last 2 years) become visually impaired, I have looked at, tried, and cobbled together numerous solutions. Here are my observations and recommendations. Keep in mind that Visually Impaired and blind are two different things, and with an aging baby boomer population visual impairments of one sort or another will be on the increase in the coming years.
One of the Linux distro's worth watching is Oralux http://www.oralux.org/, a bootable Knoppix based live CD distro that contains an audible desktop and includes braille drivers. I've had mixed luck with this distro depending on what kind of hardware you attempt to boot it on.
Personally, I use two types of system configurations to access computer based resources.
On my laptop (Win XP PRO) I use ZoonText http://www.aisquared.com/ which is a little expensive, but does the job well.
On my desktop(s) (Win XP Pro &/or Win 98) I have a very inexpensive system. A second monitor on which I place the standard windows screen magnifier. Add Virtual Magnifying Glass http://magnifier.sourceforge.net/ and Natural Voice Reader http://www.naturalreaders.com/ at a cost of $0.00/$39.95/$69.95 depending on the version. This combination works very well for a desktop system. Add Firefox, Thunderbird, Cygwin, Putty and a few other tools and you can easily use the Web and administer your Linux boxes.
On the Linux boces (I have several) I share a 19" or 32" monitor via a KVM switch. This allows reasonable access to a consol. When running X-Windows you can simply add additional entries in the XF86.config (or it's equivalent). This lets you select the zoomable features provided by programs like ZoomText. There are a lot of other pieces availble for Linux (like Festival) but unfortunately none of these are available in a comprehensive, eacy to install set. This makes it hard for the non-geek to easily install & use these tools.
This is one of the biggest areas that M$ Windows has it over Linux and OSS for the time being.

Unfortunately, it's not free either. A visually impared co-worker needed help finding free software and I couldn't not find any decent software that wasn't free. There are very few decent commercial products, either. This is a real shame because there's a lot of visually impared geeks out there who are crying out for decent software.

ZoomText is available from AI Squared and works great with Mozilla Firefox. Unfortunately at $395 the price tag is pretty hefty and there's no Linux version. Blind charities can usually sell the software at a discount, however.

Hi, I'm in college now, and I'm mostly blind. In high school, with maps, I either used a CCTV (the overhead visualiser?) or display sized maps, that a teacher would use at the front of the class room. Another good solution Tech wise, would be to scan a regular book size map in and use it as a PDF and be able to maginify it as much as you want. Unfortuanatly I'm not sure to the extent, but a solution for extreme situations such as being fully blind would be to print out the map, take a thing of elmers glue or puffy paint, and outline the maps, and have the text written in braille. Reading wise of just text, there are always text to speech engines for computers, the microsoft of the blind would be Freedom Scientific they make the application called JAWS currently at relese 5.1. Another good TTS would be WIndows Eyes by GW Micro currently at 4.5sp3. Magnification on a computer would be best done by Zoom Text, made by AI Squared. http://www.freedomscientific.com/ http://www.gwmicro.com/ http://www.aisquared.com/ Hope what I have said, was helpful and not to much best of luck to your son

I work with this type of software all the time. There are a few products out there that should fill your needs.

Since you mentioned he is not totally blind he does not need a screen reader so I will stay away from those. What you need to look at are screen magnifiers. Most will magnify the screen greatly without to much distortion of the text/graphics.

The best Magnifier (IMO) on the market right now is called Zoomtext made by Ai Squared http://www.aisquared.com/index.htm. You can download the trial version from thier website. The current version is 8.1. Win XP has a built in magnifier but its not worth the hassle.

Its not exactly a cheap program but most of the time you can get help on the cost through the school boards.

Keep

All he did was take what was available for a person of limited sight and make for one with normal sight. A co-worker of mine has a son who has limited vision and uses a tool called Zoom Text to do exactly this.