Up close and personal: ZoomText Magnifier/Reader
For those with macular degeneration or poor eyesight, a screen magnifier can bring sentences or even individual letters into focus. Recent versions of Windows include a crude magnifier, but it can't go beyond a 9X zoom, and fonts look pixelated and blocky.
AI Squared's ZoomText Magnifier/Reader can blow text up to 32 times its original size and display it in a variety of ways. It can also read what it sees -- including documents, e-mails, Web pages, application menus and so on -- aloud to you with its synthetic speech processor. The program can even be set to read back characters as they're being typed, for perfect letters or memos.
ZoomText Magnifier/Reader works only with Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Windows 7 PCs and costs $600. There's a 60-day free trial available.