My very good friend, Jerry, is losing his eyesight to glaucoma. At
this point, his ability to read depends very greatly on chars having
hard edges, being very large, and a high contrast display on a yellow-
ish background. He lives 1000 miles away, so I have to work on this by
email.
Does anyone know how to accomplish this on OS X?
The black text is fine, but the only adjustable backgrounds Jerry's
found are the terminal and the Opera browser (using client-side CSS).
Fonts on OS X are displayed with soft edges. They're fine if they can
be set to large sizes, but regular sizes with the screen magnifier are
just a blur to him. Is there such a thing as a bit mapped font anymore?
There are limits to the sizes in the Finder/System prefs that don't
allow for 'global' fonts larger than 18 points. Another friend of his
went in and "edited the plist" (Finder's, I assume, but I don't know
just what he did) to try to get around this, but it seems to have
broken some other (unspecified) stuff.
Jerry's got several computers running. Ubuntu Linux, he tells me, is
best of what he has but still far from perfect -- apparently the font
rendering in X is sharper. And KDE's KMail allows the yellow
background. But he's really trying for the Mac, largely because of
VoiceOver. (Also because he's not a computer techie -- he could design
and build the hardware from scratch, but he's helpless with software.)
Here's an idea of what his screen needs to look like:
Any ideas? I thought of trying to create font that displays 1" high
when set to 16 points, but it would be a significant project for me
just to find out if that could be done...
