Gnopernicus and gnome-mag issues

["Aurelian Radu" <ricaradu gmail com>]

Hello, dear list!

 

This is my first message here and I'm hoping that you can help me (or at least give me some hope for the future).

 

I'm visually-impaired and I cannot use a computer without a magnifier. That is one of the things that are keeping me on Windows. I use the magnifier that comes with Windows, not ZoomText or other commercial software. The basic Windows magnifier has all the features I need: I can dock it to the bottom edge of the screen (I'm not comfortable with full-screen magnification), I set the magnification factor to 9x, it runs very well, it follows mouse movement very smoothly, it follows text-editing (except in OpenOffice and in some parts of Firefox, and some other apps), and it is low on RAM and CPU resources.

 

I've tried several Linux distros (from Mandrake 10.1 with GNOME 2.10 and KDE 3.2, to Ubuntu Dapper with GNOME 2.14 and KDE 3.5.2), but magnification seems to have improved very little.

 

Kmag runs fairly smoothly and the newest version can be docked to one of the screen edges, but it doesn't follow text-editing. That means I have to move the mouse in order to bring the focus to where I'm writing.

 

Gnopernicus + gnome-mag follows text-editing fairly well in apps like gedit and gnome-terminal (even in gnomeradio!), but not in OpenOffice and Firefox. OOo 2.0.2 seems to have made a step forward: OOo Writer does get some focus, but not as it should. When you write somethin, focus goes to the middle of the line, not to where the cursor is.

 

In Firefox, whenever I write something, focus jumps to the upper-left corner of the screen. This bug has been around ever since I tried Linux 10 months ago, but it hasn't been fixed in Firefox or in any of the Linux distros.

 

Another problem is that gnopernicus/gnome-mag displays magnified areas poorly. The movement is choppy and the magnified image is full of black "patches" and portions of previously closed windows. This problem does not exist in kmag.

These are some of the issues I have encountered with gnopernicus/gnome-mag Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Aurelian Radu