Laptops for the Vision Impaired

13/01/2009 04:25 PM

We did a recent article about Laptops.  Our advice for the home user was to never buy another tower or desktop because laptops have come of age.

One of our readers who is vision impaired asked about what options he/she had relative to screen size.  The reader has options up to 17" which is what I use.   There are other options however.  Here are some helpful hints.

Large Auxiliary Screen

Keep in mind that your laptop has an option to hook up to another display and you can buy big ones for your office or home.  Even some of the new High Definition TVs have an option to hook your PC up to them.  Down at BMTS they even have wireless HD running, but that's a little way off for the consumer.

Don't forget that for about $900 you can get a projection system that hooks right into your laptop and will do a dandy job of projecting a huge image on a screen or your wall.

Multiple monitors are an option too.  Take a look at dualview  This is not new stuff.  In the late 80's I hooked up 4 displays to a single machine and moved the mouse seamlessly across all of them.  I could park a Word document over on the right and work on other things on other monitors.  The whole thing worked like on giant monitor, but you don't have to go to that extreme.

If you have severe vision problems, I'd suggest the large projection systems hooked to your laptop.

Font Sizes

You don't have to live with the font size that comes with the machine.  You can up it at anytime for system related images.  You can change the icon size too!

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Long Documents

Sometimes vision impaired people can get along fine with navigation and word processing, but have trouble reading long documents.  You can always force any document that can be printed into PDF format and view it with Acrobat.  Not only can you look at it, but you can ask Acrobat to read it for you.  It will not do anything with the pictures, but it will read everything else for you and you can listen to it.

I use this feature, if I have to write a long document.  The computer is adept at pausing at commas and open parentheses.  It's a great feature. (see docudesk)

Of course Windows has had a Narrator Feature for years.  This is free and if you do some browsing, you'll find some very fine screen readers that are quite good for the vision impaired

Windows Magnifier

Windows has a neat feature and Apple Apple has a similar feature that allows you to magnify EVERYTHING under the cursor.  It shows up in a handy window that you can park anyplace, even on another screen.

Just go to the Help on your machine and look for Magnifier and you'll be up and running with it immediately.