The Virtual Magnifying Glass as seen in this link, is a free, open-source tool that is supported for Windows 2000+, Linux, and Mac OS X. It sells itself as being customizable and easy to use.
As the title of the product would suggest, this tool is a magnifying glass for a user's desktop. Recently, they released a plugin feature called "Dynamic Mode". Dynamic allows users to interact with the area inside of the magnifying glass. For visually impaired users, this new feature would help them see what they are typing into textboxes, for example.
Unfortunately, this tool is not simple to use. In fact, there's a bit of irony with this tool. It can enlarge the viewing of items on the desktop but it can't enlarge its own menu options. In order to access the tool's menu, a user must right-click on the magnifying glass icon in the task bar. However, right-click also takes the magnifying glass off of the screen. There are a large variety of options to go through, but a visually impaired user would not be able to use the magnifying glass tool to look through these options.
Dynamic mode requires a large amount of CPU resources to run. In turn, everything else on the user's desktop runs slow. Unbearably slow. Also, there seems to be a poor choice for shortcut keys for dynamic mode. Pressing CTRL+ALT+[arrow key] moves the glass to the direction of the arrow key pressed. However, this is the same shortcut key that rotates the orientation of the screen on many computers and laptops today. For example, is a user presses CTRL+ALT+[right arrow], their screen would rotate 90 degrees clockwise. The only way to fix this is to press CTRL+ALT+[up arrow]. In my experience, I thought that the screen rotation was a feature in the magnifying glass and I found myself pressing ESC to close the magnifying glass program.
In its basic functionality as a virtual magnifying glass, it performs on par. However, this product seems to require much revision around the usability of its features and the performance of its features.
