| RVI.ORG.UK | TOPICS |

Opera 7 is a great Internet browser for partially sighted people.

It can be downloaded from www.opera.com, it is best to add the java option if you are into banking or telephone bills on line. This is quite large for 56k modems at 12,938kb.

During installation and optionally on opening you can set this as your default browser – choose NO as Internet Explorer should remain the default to get Microsoft upgrades.

The main advantages are that you can customise the font and background from the File/Preferences/Fonts and colours – click on ‘choose’ for normal.

Go to http://www.opera.com/features/access/visual/

There are many other preferences you can try, but don not reset them all at once, try them one at a time to see if you get the effect you want.

Use the Num Pad + and – to zoom in and out by 10% per press.

It only zooms the browsed page so you need to be able to type in the URL you want either using a magnifier or by good luck. When using a screen magnifier to do this the best results are obtained by changing back to zero magnification then use Opera’s zoom.

Note that the browser results vary very much with the site viewed and the font size you choose, but for some sites the results can be far better than anything else I have ever seen. If you set www.google.com as your home page you should see what I mean. There is nothing that can be done with any browser or screen magnifier for some graphics, dynamic pages etc, so don’t expect wonders every time but Opera does several tasks much better that IE6. If you email through Outlook or Outlook Express Keep doing so – Opera will not force you to change.

You can import IE6 favourites into Opera bookmarks.

A ’paste in’ registration key for Opera 7.23 is

w-c3DDQ-ryxXK-htK6r-E5NDS-vAXXk