So, I regularly change font size, style and colour to make reading easier on the eye. I zoom in on documents and web pages to limit the number of lines of text visible at the same time, as my brain tends to jump through the lines quite easily and this helps me know where I am.
This past week, I began using the text to speech function. This was such a discovery! Reading my own work on screen for mistakes is very difficult, reading a long document in itself poses problems but trying to spot grammar, spelling and contextual mistakes is not something I find easy. So my default strategy is to print out the document, then read it out loud to myself correcting as I go along, then I ask my hubby to read the document out loud and I listen for any mistakes that I had missed the first time around. Very time-consuming. From now on I will be putting on my headphones and getting the computer to read to me. It was easy to use and learn and made much more enjoyable by downloading better voices.
However, I did not master using the speech recognition tools to navigate around the computer. I am sure this is an indispensable tool for individuals with fine motor issues or visual impairment, but the length of time to master the tool seems to be considerable. I view it as akin to training a puppy to respond to voice commands!
I gave my husband a fright when I enabled high contrast browsing in Chrome and it applied it to all my devices! He was busy making a resource for a film night we host and I all turned back and white. It was easy to install, enable and disable the app, but for me was not a useful tool. I was struck by the lack of accessibility apps that were available for Chrome.
It was simple enough to change all sorts of aspects of the mouse pointer, in-fact I have left mine bigger as I am always losing it!
Trying the Tech!
So, I regularly change font size, style and colour to make reading easier on the eye. I zoom in on documents and web pages to limit the number of lines of text visible at the same time, as my brain tends to jump through the lines quite easily and this helps me know where I am.
This past week, I began using the text to speech function. This was such a discovery! Reading my own work on screen for mistakes is very difficult, reading a long document in itself poses problems but trying to spot grammar, spelling and contextual mistakes is not something I find easy. So my default strategy is to print out the document, then read it out loud to myself correcting as I go along, then I ask my hubby to read the document out loud and I listen for any mistakes that I had missed the first time around. Very time-consuming. From now on I will be putting on my headphones and getting the computer to read to me. It was easy to use and learn and made much more enjoyable by downloading better voices.
However, I did not master using the speech recognition tools to navigate around the computer. I am sure this is an indispensable tool for individuals with fine motor issues or visual impairment, but the length of time to master the tool seems to be considerable. I view it as akin to training a puppy to respond to voice commands!
I gave my husband a fright when I enabled high contrast browsing in Chrome and it applied it to all my devices! He was busy making a resource for a film night we host and I all turned back and white. It was easy to install, enable and disable the app, but for me was not a useful tool. I was struck by the lack of accessibility apps that were available for Chrome.
It was simple enough to change all sorts of aspects of the mouse pointer, in-fact I have left mine bigger as I am always losing it!