Are there any ADA features for the visually impared built into SL?

Question

Hi,
I am just about to buy a mac Mini for my Mother-in-law who suffer from macular degeneration. I was hoping that there might be some features built into Snow Leopard that were designed to assist the visually impared?

Answer 1

It's difficult to generalise for any individual user, as almost every partially sighed person has different preferences.
As V.K. pointed out, there are several features built into the Universal Access pane of System Preferences.
However, you can begin with the Desktop & Screen Saver pane in System Preferences. You can choose from a wide variety of backgrounds to give the appropriate glare reduction and/or contrast enhancement that might be necessary. Try first the Desktop Pictures folder itself, and the Nature folder (Ladybug and Tranquil Surface can be restful for stressed eyes). Wave, in the Black & White collection, can also be helpful, as can Pinstripe in the Patterns folder. Finally, it's worth exploring the Solid Colours, as icons and such show up most clearly against these.
You can also change the background colours of Finder windows (unfortunately only in Icon view), by using the View—>Show View Options menu command (shortcut Command-J), selecting the "Color" radio button and clicking on the white square. This opens the Colour Picker which enables the user to fine-tune the background to suit his or her vision. It can be very helpful to set the backgrounds of different folders to strongly contrasting colours, as they can be easily identified and selected without zooming in to see what they are. For example, if the Applications window is set to blue, the Utilities to a light brown, the Home folder to red, and the Documents folder to yellow, they are very easy to distinguish on the Desktop.
You can change the size of icons and the text identifying them, also in the Finder's View Options pane, and the Highlight colour (in the Appearance pane of System Preferences).
Moving on, in the Universal Access pane, of course there is VoiceOver itself, which enables even totally blind people to operate the Mac more or less comprehensively. However, learning this may be somewhat daunting to a person who is losing her sight, particularly someone new to the Mac. As A Brody indicated, this also provides Braille output, though again there might be a learning curve if the lady does not already know Braille. VoiceOver can be set to use Grade 1 (uncontracted) Braille, which is much easier than the contracted (Grade 2) forms.
Also in Universal Access, as Dire Wolf pointed out, there are several zoom options. The simplest is to hold down the Ctrl key and scroll with mouse or trackpad. There are also fixed zoom positions that may be more suitable, as they can be reached with a single keystroke. The zoom range is up to 20 times magnification. The zoom can be configured to follow the keyboard focus (though this works best in Apple applications, and some third-party apps do not work in this way), or to keep the cursor in the middle of the screen, or to move the image when the pointer reaches an edge of the screen.
The colours of the screen can be inverted, giving white on black instead of black on white, as referred to by Steven. Other colours may give a somewhat strange appearance—but it is worth experimenting with desktop and window backgrounds to give the most satisfactory solution. Alternatively, the whole display can be switched to greyscale, and the contrast tweaked to give maximum readability.
Finally, the third-party application VisioVoice provides a wide range of specialist contrast-enhancement and readability tools, as well as the ability to speak text or convert it to sound files for use in iTunes or on MP3 players and iPods. I know one person who uses the Text Enlarger window to show white text on a dark blue background, as this suits her eye condition best. Others prefer yellow text against muddy brown…
Hope this helps!
Archie