- From: Wayne Dick <waynedick@knowbility.org>
- Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 22:06:11 -0800
- To: James Nurthen <james@nurthen.com>, Adam Cooper <cooperad@bigpond.com>
- CC: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
It about time that we drop the myth that zoom constitutes reasonable accommodation. There are so many things wrong with reading with zoom that it is hard to start enumerating them. First there is retrace. People who read with screen magnification spend about 17 to 50 percent of read time involved in retrace. Next there is the challenge to short term memory. Thus reading with zoom is slower and much more error prone. Finally there is the noise to signal ration. On any given page only the line being read has any meaning, the rest of the page is disconnected noise. Since most people with vision loss have difficulty distinguishing signal from noise this especially problematic. Can some people read with zoom? Sure, I can, and do when no other option is available. I have read amazingly difficult content with zoom, but the experience is profoundly distracting, and it is slow and ugly work. You have to be very smart to succeed professionally with only zoom to help you, and you will never reach your intellectual potential. Wayne Dick
Received on Thursday, 13 November 2014 06:06:40 UTC