[PLUG] Visually-impaired computing

["Michael F. Robbins" <mike@gamerack.com>]

My cousin would really love to be able to use a computer for just two
purposes: word processing and e-mail.  The issue is that I've found that
she can only read from the screen if the letters are about 2" tall (and
only then with high-contrast colors like white text on a black
background).

My first thought was to get a video card with a TV out and hook the
computer to a television.  This still might be a good idea: its not like
she's going to be doing graphics work.  But I would be worried about
quality loss/resolution issues with a TV.

>From a software point of view, many apps can be configured to use larger
font sizes, but this almost always causes the UI to be unusable: buttons
so large that they push other dialog components out of the way.  Right
now I'm looking at some magnification software as well, like gmag.  It
might be a possibility.  I've also found a link that proposes a method
for increasing the size of the mouse cursor in X, but I haven't tried it
yet.

I've also looked at text-to-speech possibilities.  Speechd presents a
lot of promise, but I think it would require some glue code to get more
user-friendly apps to have better support for it.

I'm not sure yet, but XEmacs might just prove to be a big part of the
solution.  From my quick google searching, it has good support for
text-to-speech.  It would also be able to handle whatever simple writing
and e-mailing she'd need to do (though I've never used Emacs for
email).  I haven't looked into this possibility too much, but the
all-in-one nature of it might just make things easier to integrate with
whatever magnification or TTS software I find.

Anyway, I'd just really appreciate suggestions that people have.  It'd
really be great just to allow her to do some writing and to stay in
touch with family.

Michael F. Robbins
mike@gamerack.com


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