Font smoothing whilst using zoom??

Question

I am a visually impaired person, who has just converted to a Mac! I'm using the built in zoom feature, but am having trouble with blurred fonts whilst using zoom. I have tried adjusting screen contrast, colours, smoothing styles, but can't get a sharp image for fonts when they are magnified. Does anyone have any tips or soluions to help me with this?
mac mini   Mac OS X (10.4.7)  

Answer 1

The problem here is that the zoom facility simply magnifies the pixels on the screen.
For documents such as web pages, try changing the size of the font used first; the Safari shortcut is cmd + (command and plus sign), and the reverse is cmd - (command and minus sign), being careful not to take it down smaller than the starting size when you reduce it again. A judicious combination of that with the screen zoom feature should enable you to deal with most web pages.
For PDFs, use the zoom built in to Preview (again, the shortcuts are cmd + and cmd -) to get the document to a legible size, then use the screen zoom if necessary.
For your own documents, pick your fonts carefully—you'll probably find Andale Mono, Geneva, Helvetica, Lucida Grande, Tahoma and Verdana to be the most legible. Then set the default font size to, say, 16 or 18 point to begin with, work on your document making fonts bigger or smaller as needed, zooming in and out as you wish. When you've finished it, select all (cmd A) then reduce the font size uniformly (normally cmd -), perhaps four steps, taking your 16-point down to 12, which will look fine when you print it or fax it. At this point, you no longer need to read the text, so can concentrate on the shape of the layout, moving line and paragraph breaks around as you wish to achieve an aesthetic appearance.
Similarly, any text documents you are sent that can be opened in a word processor can have their fonts changed or enlarged. Work on a copy if you're worried about overwriting an original.
Hope this helps,
Archie