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where do I find this kind of consultant?
Dear brain trust,
I have some vision-related problems with my computer setup at work and our IT and HR departments are ill-equipped to help. I've got a configuration -- a combination of OS settings (Windows), monitor settings, application settings, and lighting -- that kind-of sort-of works, but it's all stuff I figured out on my own. There may be better ways to solve my problems, and some of my problems are currently unsolved and getting in my way. Meanwhile, IT really wants to push me to newer versions that seem to be worse for me.
I would like to find a consultant who is knowledgable in both vision stuff and tech stuff, someone who can sit with me for a few hours and give me informed advice about changes to make. My ophthalmologist of course knows the vision stuff but is not a techie; the techies I know don't grok the vision stuff. I need to find someone who can hear "photo-sensitive" and "restricted focal distance" and "astigmatism" and the rest, understand what that means, and suggest approaches that have not occurred to me from walking the application menus and Windows control panel and Firefox extensions. Technical areas will include the gamut of Windows display settings including custom color themes, CSS overrides in Firefox, configuration of Office and (if possible) Adobe reader, and monitor settings, among things. (Bonus points if this person can make Eclipse suck less.) Once I find this person, I intend to push my employer to hire that person for a consultation. I don't expect to have to push very hard, but I also don't expect to get multiple chances on the corporate dime.
The problem is I haven't been able to find that person. My Google searches have turned up many many consultants who will help employers comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act -- they're compliance people, not usability people. (Also, most of them are about mobility issues.) And I've found folks who will build you accessible web sites (they say). This does not help. Clearly I'm going about this wrong.
So, dear brain trust, can you help me figure out how to search for help with this? And in the "hey, I might get lucky" department, do you, dear reader, know someone who could provide this service in Pittsburgh?
I have some vision-related problems with my computer setup at work and our IT and HR departments are ill-equipped to help. I've got a configuration -- a combination of OS settings (Windows), monitor settings, application settings, and lighting -- that kind-of sort-of works, but it's all stuff I figured out on my own. There may be better ways to solve my problems, and some of my problems are currently unsolved and getting in my way. Meanwhile, IT really wants to push me to newer versions that seem to be worse for me.
I would like to find a consultant who is knowledgable in both vision stuff and tech stuff, someone who can sit with me for a few hours and give me informed advice about changes to make. My ophthalmologist of course knows the vision stuff but is not a techie; the techies I know don't grok the vision stuff. I need to find someone who can hear "photo-sensitive" and "restricted focal distance" and "astigmatism" and the rest, understand what that means, and suggest approaches that have not occurred to me from walking the application menus and Windows control panel and Firefox extensions. Technical areas will include the gamut of Windows display settings including custom color themes, CSS overrides in Firefox, configuration of Office and (if possible) Adobe reader, and monitor settings, among things. (Bonus points if this person can make Eclipse suck less.) Once I find this person, I intend to push my employer to hire that person for a consultation. I don't expect to have to push very hard, but I also don't expect to get multiple chances on the corporate dime.
The problem is I haven't been able to find that person. My Google searches have turned up many many consultants who will help employers comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act -- they're compliance people, not usability people. (Also, most of them are about mobility issues.) And I've found folks who will build you accessible web sites (they say). This does not help. Clearly I'm going about this wrong.
So, dear brain trust, can you help me figure out how to search for help with this? And in the "hey, I might get lucky" department, do you, dear reader, know someone who could provide this service in Pittsburgh?
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Irony alert: the first site doesn't play well with larger font settings.
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That being said, the best we did was a person from Perkins (local school for the blind) coming out to assess basic stuff like screen contrast, proper magnifying lenses, on-screen magnification, etc. Computer savvy, but not to the extent of CSS overrides/etc.
Do you know
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White backgrounds might be causing problems in a few other ways, too. It might be a glare issue--perhaps your cornea or aqueous humor is less-than-perfectly transparent, so the glare interferes with your ability to read. Or you might have an unusual pupillary response. Or your glasses (which I recall as being rather strong) may be magnifying the effect. You could do further experiments, like cutting out paper and making a mask where you can only see through the center of your lenses, and seeing if that helps the glare. Or wear sunglasses and see what happens. Dunno.
(Personally, I prefer green text on a black background, both for glare--I'm just really sensitive to light in general--and because my glasses' chromatic aberration means that white text gets split into overlapping red, green, and blue texts.)
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if you can be helped, I can help
A large part of the problem is that every partially-sighted person I've met is different, and will have different requirements. I can show you what works for me, and we can experiment around with what tech is available, to help find out what works for you. No doubt you will have different preferences than I do.
Another part of the problem is that the accessibility settings are often ignored by programs. For instance, I can tell my Windows 7 desktop to use fat input cursors (10 pixels), and the Control Panel happily fattens its cursors. But PowerPoint pays no attention to this setting, so I have no idea how to fix cursors in PowerPoint.
Eclipse has its own set of preferences regarding appearence. Making the fonts legible is easy, fixing the color schemes is harder, but still possible.
Firefox and Office have their own rendering libraries, so they have always been dicey about obeying control panel settings. I used to have a CSS script for making web pages readable, but I've long forgotten it, because the ability to magnify the screen, or invert it, on every platform I use today renders the CSS script obsolete. It seems that Firefox web pages on my Win7 box will render white-on-black if I turn on the 'high-contrast' accessibility option, so things are improving on that front. The hard part with them is that you're wrestling with not just the software, but with writers who say "I want my document to have red text here, and screw what the reader wants!".
Bottom line, if you can be helped, I can probably help you. I've been wrestling with accessibility settings for 20 years (starting with XDefault hacks), on many different platforms.