Hi all,

recently I became a visible impaired person and the way I use a computer changes. I need a screen magnifier and tried
Gnome and KDE. I would like to give some feedback about my experiences with the accessebility functions of KDE
4.9.5 tested on Fedora 17.

1. The mouse cursor is hard to find. Even I activate the function that should help. Two gray circles aren't enough. Gnome
makes it better with a horizontal and vertical line intersecting in the cursor. In an earlier Windows-Version (Win XP) I saw
blinking concentric circles around the mousecursor. Unfortunately my english isn't good enough to explain exactly
what I mean. If someone is interested in further discussion maybe there is a german speaking programmer.

2. The main big problem is the magnifier. The screen is magnified by pixel and not by vector. With a zoom-factor of 2x, the
text becomes blurred. For short use it's ok but for a longer working or reading longer texts it is unusable. My eyes hurts
after a long use of the magnifier.

That is my feedback. Maybe it helps you to improve KDE.
Best regards
Frank

Thanks for your feedback. We actually know that the accessibility features are not really good. It's quite difficult to implement good accessibility if you cannot understand the needs. This summer there had been a Google Summer of Code project to improve the functionality of the zoom effect. Unfortunately the feature has not been merged yet, but I hope it will become available in 4.11.

Now to your points:
1. Adding intersecting lines seems possible to add. If you could share a screenshot on how that looks like in GNOME, it would help

2. Inside KWin we cannot do vector based zooming as we only have the pixel data. We zoom an already rendered image. This has limitations. Better algorithms may be available, but nobody has implemented them so far. My personal opinion is that zooming has to be done inside the application and not inside the compositor. Using zoom in the browser will always render better results than the zoom provided by KWin. But that also comes with disadvantages of course.

Hi,
thanks for the fast reply.

I visualized the way of Gnome.

http://www.qpic.ws/images/access1.jpg
The red lines are configurable, the colour, the thickness and ...

http://www.qpic.ws/images/access2.jpg
if there is a gap around the cursor or not.

Maybe you can see that the screenshots aren't from Gnome. I already deinstalled Gnome - it was to hard for me to learn a new workflow. I took it with XFCE4, the mousecursor wasn't captured so I paited it manually.

Since I modified the fontsizes and the dpi in XFCE4, and since I adjusted the fonts in Firefox and Thunderbird I can use the computer with only few problems. While working with the screenshots I realized that the docks of Gimp are rather small and unfortunately my favourite homebanking-software is unusable for me. Ok, women are better managers so my wife can handle it in future

I hope my post was helpful.
Best regards
Frank

Hi Frank,
sorry to hear about your eyes.

The trackmouse effect was probably meant to solve the "where is it now" problem and operate on the fact that animated object are easier to spot (regardless of visual impairments)

However the rings are loaded from two images tm_inner.png and tm_outer.png in /usr/share/apps/kwin/
You can shadow them in ~/.kde/share/apps/kwin with custom variants.

Those will still rotate, but can be red, opaque and of any size - they also don't have to be broken circles but can be crosses or similar (just keep in mind, they'll rotate)

As for scaling, Martin is right - this has to be done in the application.
If you want to scale the GUI elements of (Qt) applications and have access to the Bespin visual style, you can have a rudimentary GUI scaling support by exporting
export BESPIN_SCALE=1.5 # this will scale the UI to 150% - every number > 1 is ok (but 30 will create GIANT windows)

There's also
export BESPIN_SCALE_FONTS=1 # "true"
but that does not affect any content (webpage, mass text, etc.) font and is overridden by some KDE elements - better just increase font sizes in "kcmshell4 fonts"

Thanks for your tipp, I'll try it out.

Just for information: One problem I have is, that the retina gets damaged. I only see in the center of the visual area. Normally you see an area of about 160-170 degrees. My visual area is about 7 degrees.
I know that a "normal" man can hardly imagine what kind of problems can exist with the eyes. I sit in front of a 19" monitor (distance 50 cm). If I look in the center of the monitor, I cannot see the edges. Put your index finger and your thumb to a ring. Then hold the ring 10 cm from your face and look through. Then you get an impression what I see. That is why I need a good trackmouse effect. At the moment, I move the cursor to the edge of the screen and then I follow it with the eyes.

The other problem is an optical. This problem can be corrected with glasses, but not perfectly. That is why I need large fonts.

Thanks for your response and for your tips.
Best regards
Frank

Have you tried KMag, which is part of KDE Accessibility? It is capable of magnifying the portion of the screen where your mouse is positioned.