Onex Trey is one of my video subscribers – and he has a question that I figured you might be able to help answer, especially if you have more experience with it than I do:

My name is Onex. Fresh out of Uni and travelling, exploring my options and getting to know my family roots. I’m writing from China. After Uni in Australia, I now live in Beijing and have been living in China for about 3 months now. I have never been to Seattle, and the one and only time I have been in Vegas was when I was 5 on a family vacation (so I was told, I don’t remember that trip).

Anyhow, I’ve subscribed to your YouTube channel and when I can, I watch the Ustream channel and chat. Sometimes the time differnce means I miss out on the live streams and have to settle with watching the recorded podcasts.

I have been using PCs for a while and currently run a WinXp, but because my degree surrounds Multimedia advertising, I have been advised by my Uni friends to invest in a Mac. Hopefully I will be able to enter into the Mac arena over the new year. From what I have heard from the Apple dealers in China, for consumer use (in China) Macs aren’t too common… yet. Although iPhones and iPods are very popular with a lot of westerners coming from abroad to mass purchase.

The question I would like to ask you Chris, frequently on your video podcasts I notice that you have a “zoom-in” function that you use with the Vista machine, (if I’m not mistaken that’s the machine with the 2 thirty inch monitors). As I am currently living with my grandparents, sometimes the text on webpages or when they are reading ebooks or just the desktop needs to be a bit larger.

I know for websites Firefox has text size increase and ebooks you can zoom-in, and winxp has a built-in magnifying glass (although not at all convenient to manage). I have also explored ZoomText from www.aisquared.com, Enable Mart’s BigShot Magnifier and Lightning, but after the trial period you have to purchase a full version online, and buying stuff online in China … well to my knowledge it’s not that trusty yet.

So, I was wondering, that zoom function that you use on your Vistas machine, what software is that? I’ve seen you use it and it looks very convenient, is that only available on Vista? Would you be able to recommend some other screen magnification software (preferably freeware)?

So, what kind of screen reader options are out there?