Abort, Rephrase, Ignore?

I have a need for a laptop, but also have fairly poor vision. So while I mostly don’t need a screen magnifier on my desktop machine I almost certainly will on a laptop, and colour-remapping — swapping light for dark and dark for light — is also helpful.

There are two basic hardware options: an AU$1500-2000 15″ generic laptop from Dell, Asus, Lenovo, or whoever, or a AU$2500 Macbook Pro. The cheaper generic machine could reasonably run Windows or Linux.

I already have an old Mac desktop machine so I’ve been fiddling with the screen zoom and “white on black” display mode for a while. Both work quite well. The magnifier is controlled using control+scrollwheel, inverse mode by hitting control-option-command-8, which is a bit inconvenient but not completely impractical.

ZoomText — which easily adds US$400 to the price of that cheap laptop, by the way! — has what feels like a slightly nicer zoom in terms of image quality, and the inverse-mode hotkey is rather more convenient. The “jump to focus” stuff feels more effective, too. It does a fair bit more than the built-in OS X tools do and is much more customisable, but on the other hand it “supports” Vista by completely turning off the compositing window manager.

Linux, ah.

Compiz has a pretty decent magnifier, but for the life of me I can’t get it to activate using just the touchpad and keyboard on the test laptop. And while it has some colour-filter options none of them seem to do quite what OS X or ZoomText can. On the surface one might think that all that needs doing is to select the “high contrast” white-on-blue Gnome theme and maybe make the fonts a bit bigger, but of course that isn’t really the whole story. A proper screen-inverse feature gets everything, so for example those annoying bright white web pages are suddenly a lot easier on the eyes, and it also fixes the “we have ten thousand different GUI toolsets — many of which don’t honour your Gtk+ settings — and we’re not afraid to use them” problem.

You can work around this by fiddling with Firefox plugins like Stylish to apply custom stylesheets to specific (or all) websites, or using the high-contrast stylesheet that ships with Opera, but those will break some websites. Simply switching the colours around at the display level is a whole lot easier, requires almost no configuration work on the user’s part, and can be toggled on and off at will.

So it looks like it’s coming down to cheaper hardware+much more expensive software or more expensive hardware with the required features bundled. The former is probably still cheaper by one or two hundred dollars but the overall experience is still going to be less productive for a Mac-weenie like me.

But at least I’ve come out of this exercise with a newfound respect for ZoomText, if not for the obscene price the vendor asks for it. It’s quite in line with what other AT costs, but is completely still unreasonable.

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Tags: Linux, Mac, adaptive tech //