Advice for user with impaired vision

[blind Pete]

Colin Law wrote:

> I am looking for suggestions to help a friend who has poor vision to
> use his computer.  Obviously I can make the text and icons larger but
> I wonder whether anyone can offer any other advice or any tools that
> might help further. His vision is not so poor that he needs a text to
> speech screen reader.
> 
> Colin

There are a multitude of things.  There are also an astonishing 
large number of ways that eye sight can fail.  I have a badge 
with the deliberately vague, "I have low vision." on it.  

What suits me might not suit you. 

Many window managers (screen managers?) have a feature where 
hold down a magic key (ALT in my case) and scroll the mouse 
wheel to zoom in and out.  When it is zoomed you can pan around 
to your hearts content.  You will have to trawl through 
configuration options to find out how.  Nvidia closed source 
drivers do, or at least used to do, an integer version of the 
same thing with a different key combination. 

On Xubuntu 14.04 you might want to install compiz and look for 
"enhanced zoom desktop" and "show mouse".  Compiz is a bit of 
a pain to set up, and I suspect no longer maintained. 

Do you want color inversion?  High contrast?  Low contrast?  
A big mouse pointer is nice.  "Tuxcursor-mint" is large (scalable), 
animated, and very cute. 

Changing work habits might be more important than changing the 
computer.  When you lose the pointer, learn to move it into a 
corner so that you can find it then go from there. 

What is wonderful for you might be useless for me.  There is 
much to choose from. 

BTW the guy behind Knoppix has set up a lot of stuff for blind 
people. 

-- 
blind Pete
Sig goes here...