Posts Tagged ‘ tip ’

A while back I posted a tip about adding IDs to the iPhone wallpaper. This tip involved adding your contact info manually using an image editing software on your desktop. Too tricky for most, including me. Fortunately, it turns out that ther is an easier way to do this. There are to similar apps,...
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A website, arc90 lab, offers an amazing tool, Readability, that makes web sites easier to use. Officially an experiment, Readability is a bookmarklet that strips away clutter and reformats the main content of a website so that it is easy to read. Readability is a browser bookmarklet (sort of like a bookmark on steroids)....
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Product manuals are frustrating. For, as my dad puts it, they are usually written in a language tantalizingly close to English. Just as irritating, manuals are often printed in tiny font sizes, making them very inaccessible. A few years ago, I was looking for a misplaced manual in vain. So I went on the...
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From Glenda Watson Hyatt’s Do It Myself Blog, here are 3 Tips for Making Your Hyperlinks More Usable. How many times do you skim an online article or blog post, looking for interesting or relevant links? Individuals with sight impairments using screen readers (software that reads aloud text on the computer monitor) can have...
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All Access Blogging has some great Tips for Your Blog. All Access Blogging focuses on making the blogosphere accessible, a goal close to my heart as well. Tips include: Fix Your Feed Icon What’s In Your Blog’s Title Bar? Text and Background Colors On Your Blog Can Help or Hurt Your Readers Blog Quizzes:...
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The first step to making a computer more accessible is to make everything on the screen bigger. This involves tricks like lowering the rsolution, zooming and using large fonts. These adjustments definitely increase readability and overall usability. There is a cost. Screen real estate becomes more valuable. Even larger monitors experience this problem. I...
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A fun way to liven up your computer screen is to add a favorite photo as the desktop background. The problem is the your family portrait or pet collage make the icons difficult to make out and the text hard to read. Moving to a solid color background, such as black, makes for a...
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I have collected all of the results of all my musings on and tinkering with internet accessibility in a new web page, Web Access, here on tim o’brien photos. Getting online is not always easy when you are visually impaired. Font sizes can be too small, images hard to see and colors hard to...
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Lst week, the Gadgetwise Blogat the NY Times offered this Tip of the Week: Desktop Magnifying Glass. Tired of squinting at tiny type the screen all day? In Windows Vista, you can bump up the font size — right-click on the desktop, select Personalize and click on “Adjust font size.” Once the “DPI Scaling”...
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The NY Times offere a great iPhone (or iPod Touch) trick in their Tip of the Week: Easier iPhone Zooming: While the iPhone’s Safari Web browser can bring the full versions of most sites right to the palm of your hand, it can be a pain to pinch and spread your fingers all over...
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No, I am not talking about your TV. Instead, I am thinking of both your computer monitor and your iPhone. For the visually impaired, wide is the way to go. When you need to enlarge text or zoom in on a regular basis, a wider screen is better than a square or tall one....
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PC Magazine has a tip on dealing with Font Size in Balloons. This should help you resize the font in those little comment balloons in Word. If you find this post useful or interesting, please consider buying me a cup of coffee.
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Firefox has a number of large icon themes, available here. They are easy to install and to change if you do not find them useful. If you find this post useful or interesting, please consider buying me a cup of coffee.
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Have you ever tried to change the font in a MS Word document full of equations? It does not work. Well, it works for the text, but not for the equations. To adjust the equations, you have to open each one individually, which is a complete waste of a lot of time. I bumped...
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A couple of months ago, the Times’ David Pogue wrote an article, Spending Time to Save Time, about why we do not take enough advantage of available computer technology that could make our lives easier, more productive or both. The lessons Pogue discusses apply directly to adoption of any level of ‘assistive technology’ whether...
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