Magnifiers and Stand magnifiers – The important aspect of dealing with low vision.

Low vision can be caused by a number of reasons. Genetics can play a part, such as the low vision that is common in albinism. Accidents can have an impact on a person's vision, as can age. As people age, they are at a greater risk for developing macular degeneration. Macular degeneration causes a loss of central vision, which is crucial for such activities as reading, watching television or seeing a computer screen clearly. There are low vision aids that can help make these activities a part of your life again. They can include bifocal reading glasses, magnifiers, and telescopic glasses. Many vision problems can be resolved by using a variety of suitable low vision products.
These low vision aids help to increase the size of the image seen by the person with low vision. Magnifiers can be hand held or designed as a lens to be inserted into the glass frame, and are useful for close vision activities such as reading or playing cards.
Low vision aids that utilize tiny telescopes on the glass lenses are useful when the wearer wishes to participate in activities that require distance vision, although they can be adjusted for mid-range and near vision as well. The telescopes are attached to the top of the glass lens, and you use them in a similar fashion as you would bifocals, by shifting your head to change the vision range. If your vision needs change over time, bioptic glasses can be readjusted easily to meet your ocular needs.
The needs of screen magnifier users are overlooked when implementing web accessibility on to a website. Screen magnifiers are used by partially sighted web users to increase the size of on-screen elements. Some users will magnify the screen so that only three to four words are able to appear on the screen at any one time.

The good news is that some of the basic principles for improving accessibility and usability for screen magnifiers users also increase usability for everyone. Text embedded within images can become blurry and pixilated when viewed in screen magnifiers, and therefore completely illegible. This is especially true when the image text is rather poor quality, so if you absolutely have to embed text within images then make sure the image is of high quality.

It's not usually necessary to embed text within images anymore, as most presentational effects can now be achieved with CSS. By embedding text within images the download time of each page can become significantly greater due to the weight of these images - for users on dial-up modems it can be a real pain waiting for these images to download and render.

When screen magnifier users move their magnifier across the screen one of the items that stand out to them is headings. By ensuring heading text is large, and perhaps by differentiating it through the use of colour, it will stand out to these users.

Screen magnifier users usually have to stop the movement of the magnifier when they want to read a piece of text, so when they see a heading, they can stop and read it. Because headings (in theory at least!) describe the content contained beneath them, screen magnifier users can read a heading, gain an understanding of the content beneath it, and decide whether they want to read that content or not. If not, they can simply move the magnifier down the screen and stop at the next heading.

Headings are incredibly useful for fully sighted users too for essentially the same reason. When you scan through a web page, headings are one of the items that stand out to you. Again, you can read the heading (or listen to it for a screen reader user), and provided its descriptive, instantly gain an understanding of the content beneath it. You can then keep reading or skip on to the next heading down the page.

There are often misconceptions about people with disabilities. They arise from the lack of knowledge of what people can do and what adaptive technology is available to the disabled. As one with a disability I can tell you first hand how it is to have been labeled in a category. I was told that I would not be able to do this and that. Technology opened up a whole new world for me.

magnifiers are being pulled from wallets, briefcases, and purses to read restaurant menus, fine print on documents, labels in the grocery store, etc. Many stand magnifiers users can find it quite difficult to read text at the best of times, so when it appears fuzzy to them it can become difficult to impossible to read.