Magnifying vs. Zooming & Customizing Colors

This topic provides some basic advice for using the system with screen magnifiers, zooming functionality and color contrast functionality. Screen magnifiers, zooming functionality and color contrast functionality are often used by people who have difficulties reading online. Difficulties can include low vision, color blindness, eye strain, or dyslexia. Screen magnifiers and zooming functionality are also used by individuals who have fine motor skills difficulty as they increase the target for selectable content (such as links, icons and form fields).

Magnifying vs. zooming

There are a couple of ways you can increase the size of content in TCU Online to improve readability:

  • Use the Account Settings tool in TCU Online to increase the system font size. This only increases the size of system fonts, it does not increase the size of icons and other graphics or user-created content.
  • Use an assistive technology or browser that supports zooming. This increases the magnification of the entire page. This option works well in TCU Online as images and navigation panels resize well (with the exception of legacy navbars).
  • Use a screen magnifier to magnify a portion of the page, such as the area around the cursor. Many users like screen magnifiers because they preserve the layout of the page, but allow you to focus on the content in a specific area.
  • Double-click on inline equations to view them at a larger size. This works only for equations built in the Equation Editor.

Customizing Colors

If you are having difficulty using TCU Online because of the text and background colors used, we recommend that you use a screen magnifier or other assistive technology that allows you to invert or adjust the colors on a page.

Another popular option is to use a custom cascading style sheet (CSS). There are many free cascading style sheets available on the internet. CSS works best in TCU Online when background images are turned off, but normal images and icons are left unaltered. TCU Online is a complex site with a number of different tools and page designs, as a result a fairly detailed style sheet is needed to display content effectively.