Welcome to the Screen Magnifiers Reviews Page
On the Screen Magnifiers Reviews Page, you will find the results of reviewing
several Screen Magnifiers.
Lunar, LunarPlus and ZoomText run on all Windows platforms including Windows XP.
For MAGic there are special versions for Windows 95/98/ME and Windows NT/2000/XP.
For Magnum there wasn't an upgrade the last years and it seems, that this screen magnifier
is no longer developed.
Note that the reviews of the screen magnifiers you find on these pages, are a less or more out of date. They all include the features as described, but most of them are highly improved last years.
LunarPlus, MAGic and ZoomText Xtra include speech support. These products not only let you read aloud documents, but also read aloud
Windows events like menus, controls, buttons, messages etc. This is called Screen Reading.
If you do not need speech support? No problem, all companies offer versions without speech, which are
cheaper than the version including speech support.
Dolphin Computer Access
also has a product called SuperNova. SuperNova includes screen magnification and screen
reading with extensive speech support and support for braille displays.
Freedom Scientific has designed MAGic,
so that it is compatible with their screen reader Jaws.
Jaws for Windows is the world's leading screen reader at this moment and includes
extensive speech and braille display support.
AiSquared announced that the next
release of Zoomtext Xtra 8 will include so called "blind speech" support and support
for braille displays.
The Screen Magnifiers are reviewed on the existence of basic features,
performance, stability and extra features. These featues are:
-
Magnificatio
- How much can the product magnify
- What kind of magnification modes does the product support
- What is the quality of magnification
- Does the product support font smoothing
- Can the product magnify video streams
- Is the screen magnifier stable
- What color depth is supported
-
Tracking
Tracking means, that the magnified view jumps to important locations on the screen, or
areas on the screen where something changes. For example if the user presses ALT + F in Internet Explorer
to open the File menu in the menu bar, the magnified view must jump to the File menu, so that
the highlighted menu item is magnified.
- Is the screen magnifier tracking on all events
- How is the performance of tracking
- Scrolling
While tracking is the process that the magnification follows changes on the screen,
scrolling is looking what is on the physical screen by using the mouse cursor
or the keyboard.
- What features are included to scroll
- Is the scrolling smooth, or is it sluggish and causes mouse flickering
- Is scrolling easy or difficult
- Reading documents
A very important range of features are the features that support reading documents.
- What kind of document reading features are included in the screen magnifier
- How web pages on the Internet can be read by using the document read features
- Can the screen magnifier read tables in documents column by column, since a
lot of web pages on the Internet include tables for layout reasons
- Does the product read aloud the document.
- Does the document read feature in the product combine magnification and read aloud
- Can the user start reading at any location in the document
- Can the user navigate in the document read feature
- Speech
- Does the product include speech support
- What is spoken out by the screen reader in the product
- What is not spoken out by the screen reader in the product
- Is it possible to select a third party speech synthesizer
- What languages are supported by the speech synthesizer
- Can the speech synthesizer mix with other sound like sounds from audio streams and
system sounds
- Has sound mixing any effect on the diffirent speech streams
- Other Features
Most screen magnifiers have much more features than mentioned above. In the reviews
you can read what kind of other features are included in the product.
- Is there a feature to magnify the mouse cursor and change the color of the mouse
- Is there a feature to change the colors on the screen
- Does the product include an overview feature
- Include the product specific features for accessing the Internet
If you are looking for a screen magnifier not only use the reviews for product
selection. In the download area of this web site you can find demo versions of
all reviewed products. The reviews give you an idea of the features, that are included
in the product. But before buing any product first try the product yourself and
be sure, that the product is working well for you!!!
Home
