XVI - Computer Terminals for Visually Impaired Users

The BEAM XVI is a fully featured, high performance, colour X-Windows graphics terminal designed for the Visually Impaired user. In addition to all of the features of a conventional X-Terminal, the XVI has built in features to help the Visually Impaired user. Included is the XVI screen magnification application that provides the user with the ability to Zoom and Pan around the display in real-time. This allows the user to zoom a portion of the applications display to aid readability. The XVI screen magnification application also provides a number of tools to aid the reading of text by following the text cursor and help with Motif windows with a Motif focus following tool.

The 1280x1024 resolution provides a large, detailed display area and the 72Hz refresh on a high quality 17 or 21" monitor ensures a comfortable flicker free display. Using the latest generation of graphics accelerators ensures high performance across a wide range of applications. The XVI features X11 Release 6 and fully supports the imaging extensions introduced with this release.

One major benefit of the XVI solution for the Visually Impaired is that the unit is stand-alone and requires no special software on the host systems in order to function. As far as the systems administrator is concerned it is simply another X-Terminal. Furthermore the XVI is based upon established PC architecture, and hence is maintainable using industry standard components.