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Hello TL 
A co-worker came to me this morning and told me her brother in law has lost his vision but still wants to work - mostly emails and word processing type stuff. I assume he hasn't completely lost his vision but it must be bad enough that he can no longer use a computer in the traditional way. As I am the IT Admin here she came to me to see if I knew of/could find some software to help him do what he needs to do. That is where the great TL community comes in.
If you or someone you know is in a similar situation and uses some good software please let me know by posting here or via PM. I can use google and I can compile a list of software that may or may not be any good but if I could I would love to get some personal recommendations. If you can help, please do - thank you very much.
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I dont really have a solution because I dont know much about the issue, but I once knew a graphic artist who could barely see who used a special, small, very powerful magnifying glass to view the screen. Unfortunately I dont know anything about software to help, best of luck though.
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I remember hearing about something called a screen reader that could read web pages through html tags,text and could be used for work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_reader There's a list of commercial ones and an open source one.
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United Kingdom2102 Posts
Blind or partially sighted people usually use screen readers to use computers. I'm sorry to hear your co-worker's brother-in-law has lost their sight, one of my colleagues is partially sighted and a manager at my University is completely blind, both use a computer as part if their everyday working life and get on fine.
I recommend you check out the RNIB website, they have loads of resources available and lots of info on assistive technology. You can have a look at the link below to look at the software they have in their online shop:
http://www.rnib.org.uk/SHOP/Pages/home.aspx
http://www.rnib.org.uk/Pages/Home.aspx
Obviously it's UK based but they have good overall resources I am told.
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Thanks guys
I found this comparison list via google that seems to have a lot of information on the top packages.
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Screen readers are pretty much the standard for visually impaired usage. I'm definitely no expert on the subject, but someone who was visually impaired came to one of my web development classes at my university. She demonstrated how she uses a computer and how she uses the screen reader to browse the web, and let us listen to what it says. It talks very fast (I think you can adjust the speed) and reads things in an organized manner that, over time, you can understand the layout of a webpage.
It was basically to show us the importance of properly tagging and identifying various elements.
I'm not sure if that helps or not, but a screen reader should work fine on emails, especially if he uses a fairly standard email service (Gmail, hotmail, etc.)
Edit: I should probably mention that in this case the user was completely blind.
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I work for a visual impairment charity based in England. It really depends what level of vision the person has (and how computer literate they are). Visual impairement conditions vary widely from person to person.
The best and easiest way to use a computer is to use a program to magnify the screen, with audio assistance being available when necessary. This is because obviously screen readers can be very hard to get used to, imagine listening to someone read across everything on your screen and try and work out what is going on. Not easy, and it may not be needed if you enough vision to see a magnified screen.
We use dolphin supernova access suite, seems to work ok. Speaking to one of our visually impaired volunteers I heard that ZoomText is better as supernova doesn't magnify some things properly when browsing the internet. I can't say I've observed any other package than dolphin supernova personally though so I'm not really an expert on the different packages. The most important thing really is to try out the software before buying, as what sounds the best package may not work for one particular person (plus this stuff tends to be pretty expensive unfortunately).
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If its a mac, what about Universal access? Its a feature included in all macs and it allows people with disabilities to enjoy the mac inteface by reading the screen outloud or through other features.
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EPT
