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Low Vision Simulation

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From: David Ashleydale
Date: May 25, 2012 5:48PM

Hi,

Are there any programs that can simulate a web browsing experience for
people with visual disabilities (not complete blindness)? I want to make
sure that the audience at my organization really gets why using HTML text
instead of images of text is important. I've told them things like, "When
you zoom in on a page a lot, images of text can get really blurry and
difficult to read." But I think some of them have tried doing that and
declared that they still seem pretty easy to read even at fairly high
magnification. But of course, they have excellent vision.

Here's the kind of thing that I would love to do:

1. Open a browser and go to a web page that has examples of both images
of text and HTML text.
2. Turn on a program that simulates low vision. All of the text will be
difficult/impossible to read at this point.
3. Zoom in on the page a lot in order to try to be able to read it
better.
4. At this point, the user should be able to see that magnifying the
page is helping with the HTML text, but not helping at all with the images
of text.

Another great one to do:

1. Open a browser and go to a web page that has both images of text and
HTML text.
2. Turn on a program that simulates a user that needs very high contrast
settings. All of the text will be difficult/impossible to read at this
point.
3. Change the computer setting to a high contrast mode.
4. At this point, the user should be able to see that the HTML text is
now readable, but the images of text did not change at all when the
contrast settings were changed.

Anything like that out there?

Thanks,
David Ashleydale