Design Considerations: People with Poor Eyesight

[Memento]

I'v been designing applications to fit a 1024 by 768 resolution. I don't know if this is standard practice, but I choose that resolution because people complained about having to scroll from left to right too much. A minority, maybe 10 to 15 people, have bad vision and have trouble reading the text at 1024 by 768. People even have a problem with 800 by 600, but there might be 4 or 5 people. They also don't like scrolling when they decrease the resolution to 640 by 480 or 800 by 600. What should I do? is there something I could put in my design so they have more control over how it's viewed?

 

[DrJavaJoe]

Design your program for the the lowest resolution that your users will use. So on your development machine you'll see the form much smaller and will then have to write logic in your forms resize event to adjust your controls to fit the highest resolution. If you search this forum you'll find lots of examples and threads on the subject.


Two strings walk into a bar. The first string says to the bartender: 'Bartender, I'll have a beer. u.5n$x5t?*&4ru!2[sACC~ErJ'. The second string says: 'Pardon my friend, he isn't NULL terminated'.

 

[ADoozer]

i personaly work at 1024 by 768 in all my projects.

if a minority of users complain the text or whatever is too small just point them to...

%SystemRoot%\system32\magnify.exe

If somethings hard to do, its not worth doing - Homer Simpson

 

[DrJavaJoe]

Wow, about a third of my users use 800 by 600 because they complain about their eyesight, none use 640 by 480. So I develop for 800 by 600 and with my resolution set to 1920 by 1200 on my new 24" monitor , I can almost fit four fullsize forms on my screen.


Two strings walk into a bar. The first string says to the bartender: 'Bartender, I'll have a beer. u.5n$x5t?*&4ru!2[sACC~ErJ'. The second string says: 'Pardon my friend, he isn't NULL terminated'.

 

[BobRodes]

Personally, I have an application that uses two forms, one for small screens and one for larger ones. They have all of the same controls, but I use smaller fonts and so on for the small screen form, and leave out some detail, such as shorter text values in list boxes and that sort of thing.

In Sub Main, I just create a form object, evaluate screen.width, and set the form object to the appropriate form. Then, most of my event handling logic is consolidated into public procedures in the standard module, which I call from either form's event handlers. The only thing I put in the forms is specific property sizing variables that differ between the two.

It might not be too pretty, but it works, and didn't take long to do.

HTH

Bob