Advice & Recommendations

Virtual Magnifying Glass is an open source application that shows a magnifying glass lens that follows the mouse movement. You can move the lens around the screen to view magnification of any screen area. Magnification levels can be set to your needs. To close the lens, click the left mouse button.

Virtual Magnifying Glass also adds its own taskbar icon. Left-click on the icon offers a shortcut for launching the lens again.

For those who don't use a screenreader or a full-fledged screen magnification application, this is quite a useful tool to have sitting on your taskbar for times when you might need a little help seeing a small area of your desktop.

However, for those who have issues when using high contrast color schemes, VMG has one specific feature that might help - it has the ability to invert the colors of the area being magnified. Although this is far from a total solution, it might allow quick and easy access to areas of software applications that insist on using their own colors for certain things. For example, it might allow you to view the menu, toolbar, etc. that stubbornly remains black on white, despite your best efforts to have it white on black!

More information can be found at http://magnifier.sourceforge.net.