Current Version: 3.2.2.30131
The Pointing Magnifier is a cursor replacement designed to reduce the need for fine motor control. It is also useful in getting a close look at any region of the screen without losing the surrounding context, which has been useful to graphic designers and people with low vision.
With the Pointing Magnifier, the usual mouse cursor is replaced by a semi-transparent circular "area cursor." When the user clicks, the area beneath this circular cursor becomes magnified, as if a lens. Once magnified, the typical mouse cursor arrow appears within the magnified lens, allowing for normal mouse operations on much larger targets.
- Jacob O. Wobbrock, Ph.D. contact
- Leah Findlater, Ph.D.
- Alexis Hiniker, Ph.D.
- Alex Jansen
University of Washington
- Home Page: Pointing Magnifier 3
- Paper: From the Lab to the World: Lessons from Extending a Pointing Technique for Real-World Use
The Pointing Magnifier supports all button-based actions: clicking, double-clicking, right-clicking, dragging, and button dwelling, both on the cursor itself and within its magnified lens.
Note: Due to technical limitations, it does not trigger mouse movement-based events (mouse over, mouse hover, mouse enter, or mouse leave).
In version 3 of the Pointing Magnifier, the lens itself can be dragged and nudged with the arrow keys. It also includes support for multi-monitor displays.
While Windows Magnifier (lens, docked, and full screen) primarily assists people with low vision by making the screen larger, it does not make pointing at on-screen targets any easier. It magnifies the visual space, but not the motor space.
With the Pointing Magnifier, both the visual space and the motor space are magnified. This makes on-screen targets not only look bigger to the eye but feel bigger to the hand, significantly easing pointing for users with motor impairments.
The original Pointing Magnifier was developed in 2010-2011 by Alex Jansen, with lead designer Leah Findlater and supervised by Jacob O. Wobbrock. Over a decade later, numerous feature requests and design improvements led to the creation of Pointing Magnifier 3 by Jacob O. Wobbrock, with help from Alexis Hiniker. As of version 2, the Pointing Magnifier is a complete rebuild containing no code from version 1.
- Jansen, A., Findlater, L. and Wobbrock, J.O. (2011). From the lab to the world: Lessons from extending a pointing technique for real-world use. Extended Abstracts of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11). Vancouver, British Columbia (May 7-12, 2011). New York: ACM Press, pp. 1867-1872. ACM
- Findlater, L., Jansen, A., Shinohara, K., Dixon, M., Kamb, P., Rakita, J. and Wobbrock, J.O. (2010). Enhanced area cursors: Reducing fine-pointing demands for people with motor impairments. Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '10). New York, NY (October 3-6, 2010). New York: ACM Press, pp. 153-162. ACM
This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant IIS-0811063. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this work are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the National Science Foundation.
This software is distributed for non-commercial use under the New BSD License agreement. For commercial use, please contact Prof. Wobbrock at wobbrock@uw.edu. See LICENSE for more details.
Copyright © 2011-2022 Jacob O. Wobbrock. All rights reserved.