Advice for user with impaired vision

[Colin Law]

On 2 October 2017 at 01:29, blind Pete <0123peter at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 a pain to set up, and I suspect no longer maintained.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.

Thanks Pete, useful stuff to know. He will be on 18.04 though, not
14.04. I don't think compiz is an option any more.
The system is not for me personally, it is for a friend I am helping.

Cheers

Colin