OE7 and visual impairment

David_UK

New Member
My friend has very poor vision. He can see white font on black background as long as it's BIG. Recently his family updated to IE7, but he can no longer select the font size when composing in OE7. I've checked the accessibility options in IE but they are clear. Msoft have an FAQ on the subject and state that it is no longer possible to select the font size when using plain text.
Does anyone have any good ideas before we roll the PC back to IE6?
I should mention that he has to send as 'plain text' because the recipients cannot read html mail and when viewed as plain text the font is white on white background. They get confused.

Thanks.
 
Hi there David let's see if we can help your friend. :)

Well since you checked the settings I will just skip checking there, the next thing is holding down Ctrl and at the same time scrolling backward or forward with the mouse scroller. See if that help. :)
 
Yeah, You can hold down the Ctrl key and scroll but all it really does is zoom in and he'll be missing parts of the page.

If the other members of the family want to use IE7 you could allways try putting Mozilla Firefox on the computer, I don't know if you've heard of it, but it's very similiar to IE7, some people say it's better but I won't go into that.

Anyway, there should be options in FireFox to let you select the font size and colour, and if the family use IE7 and he uses FireFox they won't need to change the settings all the time because he'll be the only one using it :)

Here's a link to the Fire Fox web site:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/
 
Yeah, You can hold down the Ctrl key and scroll but all it really does is zoom in and he'll be missing parts of the page.

Not sure what you mean, yes it zooms in but it will put a scroll bar on the bottom and sides if it becomes to large for the screen.
 
The point is that it is an alternative. Sure it's not convenient, but it's a way that he can still browse the internet. There is also Windows magnifier, which may be a little less inconvenient, but with IE7, there really isn't a good solution.
 
Yeah, He could do that, but he could put FireFox on and set the text size to a size that he can read it, and it would be only him using that browser so it wouldn't inconvenience anybody else.
 
Thanks guys for your input. I use FF myself, and Thunderbird (which incidentally would solve the problem as you can elect to send mail as HTML - which he can see and plain text - which he cant, but his recipients can. Unfortunately it's really difficult for him to learn a new app as he cannot really discern buttons let alone drop-downs, help files etc) so I am familiar with them.
Anyway, he has chosen to simply unintall IE7 and continue with OE6 - which can be configured the way he needs it. I think this is the best solution for him, but thanks for your thoughts anyway.
 
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