-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Friday 2007-10-12 at 00:08 -0500, suseROCKS wrote:
Bigger monitors are better of course but there are limits, especially on laptops. And setting the virtual screen resolution larger than the physical screen resolution so that you can pan around to see different parts of the screen can be useful in some circumstances. But adjusting font size is usually the most important technique.
Bigger monitors, unfortunately, aren't always better. It was a long time before I gave in to 19" monitors from 17" monitors. One of the most common forms of blindness or visual impairment is Retintis Pigmentosa. You may know this more as "tunnel vision." This means we have a limited range of vision. In my case, I have less than 20 degrees of vision versus the normal 90 degrees of a normal sighted person. The larger the screen, the more I have to scan (move my head) to find things.
AHHH! I understand.
As an example, one trick I use for finding my mouse pointer is to focus on the upper left corner of the screen and then keep dragging my mouse until the pointer comes into focus. Then I can follow my pointer to the location I want to use it.
Years ago, back in Windows 3.1 days, there was an add-on that allowed me to quickly move my mouse pointer to the center of the screen by clicking a set of hotkeys. Never saw it again after Win95 came around. :-( Would be great if someone could create something like that again for Suse. :-)
There was another effect available in windows that was to have the mouse pointer leave a trail behind that dissapeared in a few seconds. Moving it fast left a long trail in the screen making it easier to find the pointer.
Carlos, you're correct that setting the screen to its full native resolution and then choosing appropriate font sizes is the way to get the best quality results. Sadly, it's a total pain in GNU/Linux.
It IS a pain. :-) I've been working at it for two days now. And if you have trouble seeing and have to go to so many places to adjust settings, that's a real problem.
Then again, to give some praise, the level of flexibility is great. For example, I've created a second panel with all my favorite apps. I like that I can then explicitly change the background color of the panel to give some contrast between it and the icons. Resizing the panel also expands the size of the icons to a comportable level. Unfortunately, there appears to be no way to also increase the size of text in the panels. (Except of course, to switch to 800x600 resolution.)
I suppose you know that you can be at 1024*7680 and hit [Ctrl][Alt][-] to swith to a lower resolution and back?
Not only the fonts, but everything, I think. Enlarge everything, like a magnifying glass applied to all the screen.
Exactly.
This conversation has pushed me to have a look at the gnome control panel and try things. There is some thing named "Orca Screen Reader and Magnifier". The configuration is a terminal window that also speaks out the sentences, and then tells you to restart the session. I'm trying it now. [...] I don't see any change :-( Supossedly I would have a magnifier, but I don't see how to enable it. If I restart the control applet, it asks me choices again by voice, but the window where to type the answers does not appears. Seems to be it's bugy. Mmm... there is another applet, "assistive technology preferences". Maybe it's that one. I'll try, I have to re-log again. [...] Still I have no idea how to activate the magnifier :-( If I click on "help" in the control panel, I get a mozilla window pointing to http://localhost/susehelp/cgi-bin/showdir.cgi?lang=en&depth=1&cgipre... which doesn't help at all, as it is not opened on the exact context I'm asking for help about: it is open at the overall suse index. This is broken. Ok, the help is here: http://localhost/usr/share/doc/manual/opensuse-gnomeuser_en/manual/bssddk6.h... where there is a photo of the dialog I just used, quite unreadeable (and I have perfect sight! - just a bit of fever), and absolutely no help or hint on how to activate the magnifier or anything at all. Oh my... If I have those dificulties setting this thing up, I can imagine how dificult it must be for you... There are some settings to adjust the mouse, to, like one to make it blink on certain key.
True.
I get a bit overly emotional when that happens. It seems that it is happening more and more across the board (regardless of operating system) at a real expense to certain users. Evolution for example, you can't resize panels in 800x600. :-( I didn't have this problem in Suse Pro 9.3.
How about a plain text mail client? I'm using Pine myself (rather, Alpine, the new version (alpha)). Highly configurable, but needs getting used to it.
Out of curiosity, if we get into discussion on this in more detail, am I allowed to attach screen captures for examples?
I'm not the list-admin, but the best thing is to upload them to some server (web page) and just write a link to it here. Maybe in the gnome list would be more appropiate. - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFHEMXItTMYHG2NR9URAlksAJwPxo36FeA1VN20rK81372sPfTIqQCeOrNr YSM2t/opFv7y1Wx+SaKBnoA= =o26G -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org