She has macular degeneration, which means in her case that she has basically only peripheral vision: when she looks right at something, she can’t see it, but can see things surrounding it.
When she first lost her vision and moved in with us, I helped her set up a giant monitor for her computer, and I do things like capture certain TV shows via TV tuner card and load them on the home computer network. She can now sit at her desk and pull her monitor up so it’s inches from her face, and watch her favorite shows. She also manages just fine with e-mail and the web, using an application that magnifies her screen size by five times.
But she had a seven-year-old computer and XP, and that computer was giving up the ghost. So last week I set up a new system, running Windows 7.
Unfortunately, some of Windows 7 has been confusing. She doesn’t quite know what to make of the task buttons at the top of the screen, she has been disconcerted at the switch from Outlook Express to Windows Live Mail, and I’m wondering if there’s a way to give her some of the same look-and-feel that she had with XP.
I’m guessing he put the task bar at the top of the screen. You can tell your computer to park it on the specified part of the screen by right-clicking on the bar and going to Properties. There should be a drop-down that notes “taskbar location on screen” that you can change to “Bottom”.
I’m curious about this, too. I work mostly in OS X, but Windows 7 is everything Vista should have been. My experience with Vista relegates it to Windows ME status in terms of quality of Microsoft operating system.