Enhanced Zoom
Enhanced Zoom is a Google Summer of Code 2007 project I’m working on for Ubuntu. The goal is to bring important accessibility features to Compiz through the zoom plugin. The name of the plugin is ezoom, short for enhanced zoom.
Important features include:
- Infinite amount of zooming with input enabled
- Tracking of focus; the zoomed area can move when focus changes
- Easy ways of fitting the zoom level to a window, either with a key binding or during focus tracking
- A D-Bus interface for other applications to control the behavior of ezoom
- Floating zoom levels
- The speed of compiz (This is not a ezoom specific feature obviously, but should be pointed out as ezoom will often be significantly faster than other screen magnifiers, and less intrusive.)
- Different panning modes: Keyboard panning, mouse panning when the mouse hits the end of the zoom area or zoom follows mouse.
- Pre-defined hotkeys for quickly reaching specific zoom levels.
The D-Bus interface will be used so ezoom can follow the text caret, among other things, with the help of either a small stand-alone script fetching AT-SPI data, or Orca. This bit is still in development as of this writing.
Ezoom is currently found in the Compiz Fusion plugins-main package, and in Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon.
Hi Kristian, just wondering what news, if any, is available about text cursor tracking with ezoom?
Comment by Jonathan — December 18, 2007 @ 2:46 am
I’ll quote myself from: http://dev.compiz-fusion.org/~kristian/2007/12/06/the-way-ahead-for-compiz/#comments
Quote:
As for caret and cursor tracking, this popped back on my todo recently. I discussed magnification in general at GNOME Boston this year, and showed my ezoom-patches for orca to Joanmarie. It’s a small proof of concept patch, and we agreed that it does the job of proving the concept but is not usable to any real degree. The original plan was for Joanmarie to look into doing it properly for Orca, but she hasn’t had time yet, so I might have to do it myself.
End quote.
Right now I don’t have time either. I will see in January, but I am not promising anything.
Comment by kristian — December 18, 2007 @ 3:38 am
Hi,
I really enjoy the enhanced zoom feature! It’s very usefull in a vary of tasks.
One thing I noticed recently is the change of not being able to zoom out quickly with the mouse.
There used to be an option to zoom out to 1:1 with a button2, now it can only do this with 1 (keyboard only)
Is there a way to bring back this feature or to bypass the settings manager to set it up?
Thanks in advance,
tabasco
Comment by tabasco — April 14, 2008 @ 1:48 am