Tech Chat

Brynmor
Brynmor Member Posts: 1,755

Paging Val's Cafe

We are trying to write some simple guides to help with reading the Online Community for those with restricted vision.

The solution must help people such that they can also read other web sites and so it should provide basic information about setting up the computer/mobile phone to work in all situations.

Using the Heading Values such as H2 (set up for posting titles and headings) is not ideal as this may mess things up for some software that reads the text aloud to those who are blind.

So, please take a look at our draft guidelines to see how we can improve them.


We will also be exploring the resources at Ability Net - where you can request free IT support at Home 😀

Comments

  • toady
    toady Member Posts: 2,096

    Just to mention I can't see Leave a Comment as an option on the draft guidelines page itself (but can leave a couple of quick thoughts here if preferred?)

  • Brynmor
    Brynmor Member Posts: 1,755
    edited 10. Mar 2022, 14:59

    @toady Oops - the post is in a protected area, my mistake! 😶

    I will fix this shortly but, yes please, do comment here!

    Update - please post comments here !

  • toady
    toady Member Posts: 2,096
    edited 10. Mar 2022, 16:43

    Thank you :)

    The guidelines read nice & straightforwardly to me so can't add much to those - just a couple of thoughts -

    (Note, I am still using Windows 7 at present 😳 can only speak from that point of view at the moment.)

    For a while I've been using a program to reassign keys, into a keyboard shortcut of my choosing - for example I use the 'end' key to function as 'reload current page' as it saves peering to find the F5, or clicking into the browser toolbar. This could be used to make 'Ctrl and +' and so on work with one key press. I do find this very handy personally for anything involving Ctrl plus something, as having not very good hands either, it's just one key. (This is a slightly techie option, I just mention it for anyone that might be interested as I'd be happy to post details; although I'm not an expert, I have literally just used it for the very narrow purposes I want it for). It would of course mean in this instance you need to have 3 keys you use rarely enough to not mind giving them over to another purpose! Maybe pg up, pg down and end for example. It also involves downloading a (trustworthy) free open source program, I believe there are several available, but I wouldn't post them here without permission. Just to mention, this can be undone, it's not a permanent change, but you can set it to run automatically on startup and therefore once set up there's nothing else to do on a daily basis except get used to which keys you've reassigned & a sticker or something would do as a prompt if needed.

    Otherwise the only thoughts I have are to mention the Windows built-in function to enlarge everything (not very flexible as it stays at that magnification until changed again) or the temporary magnifer tool, which personally I would prefer to Ctrl and + etc, but is a fairly small onscreen widget which I realize might in itself not be easy enough to see to fit the purpose of helping with restricted vision.

    This may not be the sort of thing you're after! as you may want to just stick to outlining the browser display options you've given as clearly as possible to keep things simple. 😃 But just adding for anyone interested in alternatives or people who like tinkering, like me.