Thursday, August 30, 2018
How Designers Can Utilize Mac OS X Accessibility Features
How Designers Can Utilize Mac OS X Accessibility Features
This article is for any of those designers who have ever had issues which make it difficult to be productive at a traditional workstation. Here are a few examples: one hand doesnt cooperate, you have difficulty typing, or cant sit upright in your everyday office chair. As a designer, my job is relatively easy on my body. Im worked a number of physical-labor jobs in my life and I am so grateful that my daily work does not leave my entire body exhausted (like those plant nursery-worker and home improvement warehouse jobs I had many years ago). But still, there are sometimes when bodies just dont cooperate with our deadlines, and eventually, well probably all need to find creative ways to get our work done when certain body parts are working against the deadline. Ive compiled some ideas that I hope will help some of my fellow designers still get work done on physically rough days.
Working One Handed
Lets say one of your hands doesnt work: maybe you broke your arm, or had hand surgery or something along those lines. For whatever reason, one hand is non functional.One solution: Change hands. If youre right handed, try working left handed. Move the mouse over to the other side. At first I tried just moving the mouse to the left of my keyboard. But even though I was working left handed, my left hand still knew that "left click" was supposed to be done with my index finger, and "right click" was supposed to be done with my middle finger. So I had to also change primary button as well. It was a little slow at first, but I got used to it for the most part. To change the primary mouse button, go to System Preferences > Mouse.
Cant Sit Upright
Lets say you cant sit at your desk: maybe you have headaches, or you are in a full body cast, or you have to keep your feet elevated above your head. For whatever reason you are flat on your back but you still have to get your work done. One might think that the solution would be to take your laptop and just lay down on the sofa. But if youve ever tried working like this, youll quickly discover that it doesnt work. Especially on a 13" laptop when designing oversized newsletters. So try this for a more productive workday:
Step 1: Chaise Lounge: Position a chaise lounge on the floor in front of your desk. Because the head and feet can be raised independently, you can put both at the correct angle for whatever your body needs.
Step 2: Move the monitor close to the edge of the desk and tilt it downward.
Step 3: Get a lap desk and move your keyboard and mouse down there. In this case, a small wireless keyboard (without a 10 key) would work much better than a large wired keyboard.
Step 4: Zoom in. Now, we all know how to zoom in our favorite Adobe programs using the marquee zoom, but do you know how to zoom in on everything? When sitting upright at a desk, those Adobe panel menus are a perfectly reasonable size. But when youre several feet away from the screen, those panel menus suddenly seem ridiculously small. I used to think that the only way to increase the size of the panel menus was to decrease the resolution of my monitor, but the problem with that is that you lose way too much screen real estate once. I found a much better solution. Zooming in on the OS level! Watch the short video below for a quick demo.
This feature would also be really useful if youre screen-sharing from a small screen onto a larger screen.
Step 5: Giant Cursor: If your cursor is just too dang small and you keep losing it, go to System Preferences > Accessibility > Display. Change the cursor size from Normal To Large. The cursor will then display about ten times larger than normal. (I wanted to take a screen shot demonstrating how giant the cursor becomes, but whenever I tried, the cursor is either not included in the screenshot, or shown at its regular miniature size.) I also find Giant Cursor useful when doing training. The people watching may not be as familiar with the software as I am, so having a giant cursor makes easier for them to follow along.
I hope you find these tips useful. If you use any of these tips, I love to hear about it. Please leave a note in the comments. And if you know why Dictation doesnt work in InDesign, do tell!
