Apple Support Responds to Magnifier Focus Post
Originally posted August 28,2008
Apple support responded quickly to my Mac OS X requirement suggestions. Some of their responses indicate to me that they are not standing still on making their magnifier a state of the art tool for low vision users. Apple is a leader in OS accessibility and that is why I use a Mac.
- Provide text smooting. – Apple provides image smoothing but not text smoothing. When text is magnified beyond 4x, the user can see “digital jag”. The text has raged edges where the magnifier shows individual pixels. This could be resolved. Performance issues will have to be overcome. Commercial magnifiers have this feature. [Apple]: http://developer.apple.com/leopard/overview/ mentions Apple is already moving toward resolution independence which will ultimately enable on-screen elements to scale without jaggies.
- Provide a magnification spotlight. – This will allow the user to only magnify a small area of the screen. This helps with context. Windows allows the user to determine the size of the magnification rectangle. All magnifiers need this feature. The user should be able to toggle between full screen and spotlight quickly. [Apple]: Apple includes a developer tool called Pixie, that provides “spotlight” magnification in a window up to 12x magnification. (it’s on the Mac OS X DVD in case you didn’t install the developer tools on your Mac.) It ships with every Mac. Your thoughts on how it might be useful as an end-user application would be appreciated.
- Provide keyboard shortcuts. - Shortcuts should be one-handed. Shortcuts are needed for; toggling magnification on/off, moving the magnification focus up/down/left/right, switching from full-screen/spotlight and increasing/decreasing magnification. This would help with keeping magnified information in context. Sighted users who are working with visually impaired users would GREATLY APPRECIATE this support! [Apple]: Mac OS X provides shortcut keys for enabling and disabling zoom, changing magnification and smoothing, and provides for trackpad and mouse scrolling control of the magnification (press the Control key while dragging the trackpad or scrolling the mouse). Zooming is also enabled by default in Mac OS X.
This is good news about the text smoothing support. I will try the Pixie tool and report back on it. It would be nice if the Pixie tool could be made part of OS X and integrated with the magnifier as described above. Two magnifiers are not needed. I will encourage Apple to include additional shortcuts as described above. It is worth noting that Apple provides a real time magnifier that is ahead of competition. We will report on Microsoft’s response.