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Peripherals for the Visually Impaired?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the interim-solutions-until-visual-implants-ara-available dept.

schmiddy asks: "My father, a self-proclaimed Internet junkie, recently lost most of his eyesight, but he can still see a bit out of his right eye (enough to read magnified text on a monitor, with a narrow field of view). As he spends a large amount of his time surfing the web and reading, he's been finding it hard to cope. I've seen a lot of cool toys out there for the rest of us, but can the Slashdot crowd recommend any special monitors, peripherals, or (preferably (F)OSS) text to speech or other software that would help? I think he would much rather continue reading the old-fashioned way than having to use a hack like a Braille output. Also, what about the idea of simply using a large TV screen as a computer monitor?"

2 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. sorry to hear about your dad's vision by 8282now · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I used to have a prof in college with a similiar problem. He was legally blind but still teaching (Comp Sci).

    His solution was to use a very large monitor (for the time), something like a 21" with the text magnified to a point that was comfortable for him. Basically the text was about .25 inches high.

    I think I would've begun to lose sight in MY eyes trying to work from his screen but it seemed to work for him.

  2. Re:Check the OS by Bishop · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Those "useability" tools in OSX and XP suck for the visually imparied. Those tools were written by sighted people unable to comprehend how a person with partial sight would use a computer. Basically the whole windowing/desktop paradigm does not work well.

    A large high quality magnifying glass is far better then any of the screen magnifiers. With a magnifiying glass it is possible to use some positional information from the screen because the user can determine where the magnified part of the screen is in relation to the rest.

    I have found that text based tools can work better then GUI based. With text based tools it is easier to blow up the font to 2 inch high letters (and larger). This works well with a minimal window manager with no overlapping windows like ion or ratpoison. GUIs tend to waste too much screen space, especially when you increase the font size. With a magnifying glass the buttons and icons don't need to be huge.

    There is a screen reader for emacs, but I have not used it. My client is partially deaf as well.