NVDA with Magnifier Tool

[Soumik Roy-Chowdhury]

Hi All

I am a Software QA Tester who is championing Designing and Testing for accessibility

within the company that I work. 

One of our employees uses Dolphin SuperNova Screenreader / Zoom Text Magnifier

but it is causing numerous issues and crashes a lot. Dolphin support hasn't been brilliant either. 

We are looking at other solutions to support them. NVDA seems to work for the screenreader part of it with the applications they use. But do you know what associated 

Magnifying tool that can be used with NVDA.

Any help will be much appreciated.

Regards

Soumik

[Quentin Christensen]

We would recommend trying the built in Windows magnifier.  it has improved in recent years and the magnification is quite smooth (a criticism of earlier iterations of Windows Magnifier).

Press Windows+plus to turn on or zoom in.

Press Windows+minus to zoom out.

Press Windows+escape to turn off entirely.

Press control+alt+i to invert the colours

Full list of keyboard commands available here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/magnifier-keyboard-shortcuts-and-touch-gestures-6d7c3095-75ec-258f-6f5b-3b0bc19a18e7

Kind regards

Quentin

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Quentin Christensen

Training and Support Manager

NV Access

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[Soumik Roy-Chowdhury]

Hi

Thanks for the info. But we still see some issues with blurry text when at x5 / x6 magnification. I attach some screenshots.

Are there any other magnifier tools that you may be able to suggest?

Regards

Soumik 

[Quentin Christensen]

Hi Soumik,

Something looks odd with your setup.  Can you share your settings for getting that first image?  I just turned on Windows magnifier, and bumped it up to 675% (just to ensure I wasn't on an even number, if that made a difference).  Here's how it looks on your email:

With much testing, what I have found works best:

1. Leave your screen resolution at Windows recommended (usually the highest it goes.  This makes everything smaller than using a lower resolution, but gives the smoothest, clearest text - we'll make it bigger again in a moment - Mine is set to 2560 x 1440)

2. Go into Windows "Display" settings.  Set the value to the highest in the drop down list (this will vary depending on your video card and monitor.  On my system, it offers up to 225%.  Rather than adjusting the drop down list, you can activate the whole item and that takes you into "Customised scaling" where you can set a value from 100 - 500%.  I would recommend staying somewhere around 200 - 300.  The higher you go, the more likely you are to run into problems with programs not displaying correctly / text running over other text etc.

3. Go into accessibility settings > Text size.  There is a slider where you can set the text size from 100% up to the same value as you set for scale.  Again, the higher you go, the more likely you are to run into problems.  I have mine set to 137% and I remember it is precisely at that value, because at 138% there was .... something I use regularly, which suddenly didn't display correctly - so it can be worth some trial and error with these values.

As you set each of these, Windows will adjust as it goes - particularly for the scale, it takes a number of seconds to sort itself out.

NOW, if you need larger, start using Windows magnifier.  In the accessibility > Magnifier settings, you can adjust the zoom increment.  The default is 100% - which can get you up to 500% quickly for instance, but it's hard to make small adjustments from there.  25% is a good amount - once you've got it to near where you want it, you often only want to make small adjustments to make something tiny a little bit bigger again - or make something a little smaller.

Note that the magnifier shows you an exponentially smaller section of the screen the higher you go.  At 200%, everything is twice as big, but what that means is that you only see half of the width of the screen and half of the height (at full screen magnification) - which is only one quarter of the screen.  At 300% magnification, you are only getting 1/9th of the screen.  At 400% it is 1/16th, and at 5x it is 1/25th - or 4% of the original screen.  That is not much.  Here is a screenshot of our website and how much of it you can see at 500% (in pink):

Beyond about 400-500% magnification, we would strongly encourage a user to rely more and more on what NVDA is reading moreso than trying to follow everything visually on screen.  Even if reading the screen visually isn't tiring for the user, just the time taken to find everything on screen at this level of magnification is a lot more than it would take to read it efficiently with NVDA.  Visual reading could then be reserved for tasks or programs which may not work as well with a screen reader - eg if a user wants to edit images as I have there to make that screenshot.

Kind regards

Quentin