From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: From: west9@worldnet.att.net To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: [9fans] Proposed Aid for the nearly blind Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2004 15:35:22 -0500 Topicbox-Message-UUID: c37a0c04-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 As an aide to the nearly blind, I would like to design and build a Plan9 or Inferno based system that presents text one word at a time in the center of the screen in a font perhaps 25mm high. The progress of the text would be controlled by keyboard entries in the style of vi. I am motivated to try this by having observed an elderly physician with macular degeneration use a commercial pc application that presented enlarged text as a crawler under mouse control. He was very challenged, and it seemed to me that the computer should be doing more work. The scheme of presenting text one word at a time comes, I think, from research into computeraided speed reading at Bell Labs in the 1960's, at least that's where I remember seeing it. It was found that reading was fastest if the sequentially presented words were sized to occupy a fixed area in the center of the screen If someone could sketch out the software development that would be required to test out this idea, I'd be much obliged. -Tom