Please understand that this is not an angry post! I'm just trying to explain my situation. I'm freaked out and scared. I appreciate that there are some people that are willing to try and help me!
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Just to make sure that there is at least some functionality to the Windows magnifier, let me describe in detail, what I have now in Windows 8.1.
*The magnifier follows me as I type or move the cursor with the arrow keys, in FIREFOX, and in WORDPAD and in NOTEPAD... and in SOME USER MANUALS... and in WORD PERFECT.
*The magnifier can be resized easily by placing the cursor on its border and dragging.
*The magnifier can be moved to any position on the screen by placing the cursor anywhere inside the magnifier and dragging.
That it doesn't work for everything, is yucky but I get by with that level of functionality. Could you please look at the magnifier and see if it at least has that functionality?
Playing around with something tells you little or nothing about whether it works for people who really need it. I devised a method of rhythmic speaking for stutterers, to try and help a friend who had a rather bad stuttering problem. I remember telling him how easy it would be to use... and how he would be cured if he could learn my system! I had trouble understanding why he was having so much trouble using my miraculous "cure..." until I had to take a certain medicine, and I began stuttering as well! When I tried to use my method of stopping the stuttering, I realized the workaround was nearly impossible to use!!! My friend told me that the only benefit he got from the system was that he could now tell a telephone operator his phone number without stuttering. (Many stutterers can get around the stuttering by "saying something else," but you can't change you're phone number in order to do that!
Most people think if you have trouble seeing, what you need is for things to be larger! But that's totally untrue! There are many different kinds of visual impairments. I didn't have to enlarge my notes for a radio show I did years ago here in New York. I just stretched the text out in an art program on my little Mac. Of course this only worked in the radio studio. I only redd part of the text... to remind me what questions to ask my guests. It won't work with what I do on a computer. Different people need different fixes! The answer is to always ADD functionality! Never take features AWAY! This way you can reach more and more people. The LENSE mode sounds like it was devised by people who have no visual impairment at all. (Admittedly, I could be wrong about that), but the biggest problem with LENSE mode for me is, it's nothing like using a real magnifying glass... because you can't look UNDER it! I tried it, and continually got lost on the screen! It was almost as bad as FULL SCREEN! In FULL SCREEN, it's like looking for you're car in a giant parking lot after you forgot where you parked! I need to be able to see the unmagnified screen as well as the magnified, in order to tell where I am on the screen. My iPhone has this! But, of course, it doesn't work!!!!!!
I also have a movement disorder... making it difficult to move the mouse in certain ways. Having to move it along a line of text, in order to read something is very difficult for me!
And one of the characteristics of my eye condition is involuntary eye movements. I have to keep the magnifier DOCKED, at the bottom of the screen so I can look DOWN at it. This way, I can reduce the involuntary eye movements. And in order for me to keep looking directly at the strip of magnified text, it has to be a wide strip stretching all the way across the screen. Only 1 or 2 lines of text fit in the strip so my eyes don't wander too far from what I'm reading. And if I can't see what I'm typing, for some mysterious reason, I make typo after typo. When I had my Mac 128 back in the 1980's, I went for years thinking it said "Get Into," on a menu on the screen, (when it really said, "Get Info")! I'm an artist. In Adobe Illustrator, I often use the magnifier to draw. The magnifier follows my pen, making it possible for me to create stuff. All through school I wished for stuff like this! A machine that would read text books for me! Little did I know that in the "future," this beautiful machinery would continually fail, leaving me high and dry, over and over again... sometimes for years!
Would it be possible for me to run 2 operating systems on my computer? Can I install Windows 10, but keep Windows 8.1 until Microsoft gets around to fixing this thing that will lock many people out of their computers for who knows how long?
I'm totally freaked out by this! I was already blown away when I found out that I couldn't get help installing Win 10 without a magnifier! And now I find that the magnifier will be gone for who knows how long.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. I really really really really appreciate your help. And that goes for everyone who is helping me get through this. Thanks.