The experience was an eye opener (forgive the pun). Working on my laptop without enabling any of the tools was virtually impossible. The drops resulted in a very small area of blurry focus in the very centre of my vision, so using the keyboard was a very hit and miss affair and pointing the mouse cursor at anything meaningful was equally random.

Just trying to access Apple’s Universal Access Tools preference panel was difficult and perhaps something I should have had ready before the drops were administered, but happily the copy in the preferences panels is large and bold making it just about readable. Unhappily, the radio buttons and slider controls are still standard size, so actually switching the options on and off or adjusting their parameters was very tricky.

On the first tab are the controls for Seeing. The zoom was very welcome since the large text was much easier to decipher, but the real relief came when I changed the display settings from Black on White to White on Black. With my pupils dilated, my eyes were very sensitive to light, so looking at light text on a dark background was much easier than the standard view. I did try the Voice Over utility, but it sounded like the voice of a developer describing the widgets that make up a dialog box, so I quickly abandoned it.

The second tab contains some basic controls for allowing users with impaired hearing to set the entire screen to flash if there are alert sounds and gives access to the standard sound settings preference panel. Luckily the pupil dilation drops did not affect my hearing, so I didn’t make use of this function.

The third tab contains the keyboard controls and since my current six and a half finger system isn’t touch typing and with the keyboard a blur, hitting the right keys was very difficult, I thought that they might provide me with tools to make my keyboard usage a little more accurate. Unfortunately, neither the Sticky Keys nor the Slow Keys features really helped.

Sticky keys makes modifier keys persist until the final key in the combination is pressed, for example when saving a document with Apple-S. Making the Apple key sticky means that users don’t have to hold it and the S key at the same time. This is clearly useful for anyone who does not have the dexterity required to do this, but did not help me identify which key I had pressed. My hopes were further dashed when the display pressed keys on screen option only showed the modifier keys on screen rather than repeating all keystrokes.

Slow keys didn’t really do much to improve my typing either. It is designed to alleviate the problems caused when pressing multiple keys at the same time, by introducing a delay before a key is accepted, thus allowing the user to correct any mistakes before a key is actually entered. Since I could feel my way around the keyboard, pressing multiple keys at the same time was not really an issue.

The final tab contains the settings for mouse and trackpad, including Mouse Keys, which replace the mouse controls with keyboard shortcuts for moving the cursor. Given my troubles with the keyboard, this was quickly dismissed, but the ability to change the size of the cursor was very welcome and although I could still not type properly, I could now both read the screen and click in the right place.

In conclusion, I was pleasantly surprised at the difference the Mac’s on board accessibility tools made to my experience. The standard settings did not allow me to read anything on screen or interact with it in a meaningful way. Once I had inverted the contrast, zoomed in and increased the size of the mouse pointer, I could once again read web pages and see toolbars and other navigation in applications.

I’m sure that touch typing would have solved some of my keyboard issues, but a utility to show a large display of all key presses on screen would still be very welcome. Zooming in to formfields or text input panels did help, but it is cumbersome. The Voice Over utility does have a function to read out each keypress, but without turning off the vast array of other options, it was very disruptive.

Admittedly it was only a very informal test to pass the time while the eye drops wore off, but it did give me some very valuable insights. While I’m not suggesting everyone should rush out to their opticians for pupil dilating eyedrops to run their own test session, I do believe that my first hand experience of trying to use a computer with a visual impairment for a few hours has been priceless.