What do you use for Low Vision accommodation?

Friends with Low vision

If you have low vision and you are on this list, you probably have
good computer skills. Most of you are professionals like me.  Owing to
a general lack of good tools for low vision, I hack a lot.  This is
mostly so that I can read.  So, here is what I do.  What do you do?

First I use my Mac Book Air.  It has free screen reading and zoom.
The Safari browser enables alternative style sheets easily.  It also
has good text only enlargement.  Firefox is also good, but using
alternative style sheets is more awkward.

Voice Over - The Mac screen reader works much line all screen readers.
 It is not at all oriented to people with low vision.  However you can
adjust your input, and trick it into a pretty good rendering of the
text.  It does talk too much and makes it very hard to use a mouse.

The Mac Zoom feature is excellent for filling our forms, reading pop
ups, and reading small menus.  It works line most zoom features with
all the strengths and limitations.

I use alternative style sheets that I author.  Anyone who wants one to
start their own, just ask. Some pages are just too flawed for
alternative style.  CSS sprites and generated content are a serious
problem for a general style sheet.  Changing background color can
render a page inoperable.

For many pages I just use text-only enlargement. Pages with table
layout can ruin this accommodation by elongating the horizontal line
length an preventing word wrapping.  The recent discussion about the
AFB word wrapping issues result from this design flaw.

I also use a Kindle.  I like it much better than an iPad.  This is
because you can have a horizontal view that is one column.  The
very-very large print setting can work better in horizontal mode.  As
far as the Kindle menus are concerned I just use my 700% reading
glasses.  Bookshare books convert well to a kindle format.  Just take
the xml file and convert it to html.  This is easy.  Juse read it into
a browser and save the generated text.  Seamonkey is perfect for this.
 Just read in the xml file, change to edit mode and save the file as
html.  The Bookshare books all come with an XSLT file that converts
the xml to html for display in browsers.  An old W3C member, Harvey
Bingham was a writer.  Since, Bookshare records the entire NY Times
bestseller the text-to-speech issue is a non-issue.  Use Calibre to
convert from html to mobi.  Mobi is a format the Kindle will read.

For PDF, I convert it to HTML.  Then I change all the occurrences of
"style=" to "title=".  The Acrobat converter produces no "title" tags.
 Then I apply my own style sheet to the resulting HTML.  This is crude
but it works 99% of the time.  I even converted the ECMA 5 standard
that way.

Well that is what I do.

Received on Wednesday, 15 August 2012 23:15:37 UTC