Getting Online Low Vision: Low Vision in Chrome

I'm Vikki Vaughan, and today we'll learn how to activate built-in low vision options in our Chrome browser. This workshop is intended for users for low vision. If you use a screen reading program, be sure to check out our screen reading version of this workshop.

Let's start by locating the Chrome icon on our desktop and opening it. Now we'll move to our options menu, located in the top right corner of our browser. It looks like three gray dots in a vertical line. When we select it, a menu pops up. From here, we move down to our settings option and click to select it.

With this action, we've opened a new tab entitled settings. Now, if you're wondering where our original webpage is, not to worry. It's still open, but waiting in the background while we focus on the settings tab. That's one of the really cool features of our browser. We can have multiple tabs open at once. If you'd like more information about that opening multiple tabs in your browser, have a look at our workshop entitled, Navigating Websites.

Let's scroll down through our settings page, and we see that it's grouped into various categories. We're looking for the appearance tools. Let's explore these tools and see what we can find for low vision. Our first tool is themes. Now, we won't cover this topic today, but I encourage you to have a look at the Google Chrome web store. There you can find various color themes, including high contrast themes for users with low vision.

Our next low vision tool allows us to control the font size. By selecting the dropdown menu, we see five different choices for font size from very small to very large. Let's have a look at the largest font size. We see that the font size changes to a much bigger option. Now, that's great for using the settings menu, but does it have any effect on other web pages? Let's have a look and find out.

I'll use Wikipedia's website to demonstrate how the different font sizes appear on a website. First, we'll change the font size back to the default of medium for comparison. Now, we can see Wikipedia's website contains multiple blocks of texts in varying font styles and sizes. Most of the font is small and would be difficult for many of us to read. Now, let's change our font size to very large in Chrome settings and then we'll revisit the site. We certainly see a change in our font size, don't we? This control can be a quick fix for websites with texts that's too small and difficult to read.

Our next low vision tool in theory allows us to customize our fonts on websites. These days, however, most websites have designated font styles. For those sites, changing the font size is our only customizing option. I encourage you to explore this control on your favorite website.

Now let's have a look at our final low vision tool. The page zoom tool has a dropdown box that provides many zoom options from 25 to 500%. Let's choose 150% and revisit the Wikipedia website to view the changes. We immediately see a zoomed in website and the page has been formatted to fit our enlarged image. We can use our scroll bars to view various articles of interest. Today we explored low vision options in our web browser. I'm Vikki Vaughan and I thank you for joining me.

This one in a series of workshops called Getting Online.