Zooming accessibility | Talks

Forum Index > Zooming accessibility

Ian Gilman 31 months ago
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One often-cited downside to most zooming technologies is the lack of accessibility features (for people with vision impairments, physical impairments, etc.). I have to admit to not having given it much thought (despite working on zooming for the last four years), but I think it's just a matter of spending the time on it; zooming is still young compared to other interfaces. In fact, I would imagine there are ways in which zooming is actually an improvement for certain accessibility scenarios (for instance people with poor vision being able to zoom in to make the print on their screen legible). So what do you think? What needs to be done to make zooming accessible?

james.davis 31 months ago
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I think critical to this is the simple step of supplying a choice of interface options, so that feature sets remain complete despite varied user setups. A simple step in the right direction is to offer interface parity between mouse and keyboard configurations, so users do not lose out if they have no mouse wheel, are using a trackball, a touchscreen, only have a keyboard and so on. I think Picasa (desktop) does a pretty good job of this, with 3 great ways to zoom. But then compare with Picasa (web) with just a single rather poor zooming implementation.