For those hard of vision, the iPod, iPad and iPod Touch devices do provide a certain degree of accessibility options. Nonetheless, reading the small text, particularly on the smaller screen devices, can sometimes be challenging. Sure, you can pinch to zoom, but swiping across three times to read one sentence isn’t exactly convenient.
What if there was a way to just increase the text size a little? As you would in a document creating software if you couldn’t properly read. While unfortunately Apple doesn’t (yet) entertain this feature, a developer called tom-go has given us the next best thing – a jailbreak tweak that does. Once you install the tweak, named Magnifier for Safari, all you’ve to do is hit the Share button in Safari and you will be presented with a new “Adjust FontSize” button, which in turn will bring up a slider from which you can do just that.
For 99 cents, it’s a snip, and will hopefully put an end to the squinting and endless sliding that some of you have to endure. It works nice and smoothly, and integrates with Safari as if it were stock a stock feature. It doesn’t work for the iPad, but being a larger device, browsing is nowhere near as tedious as on its smaller counterparts.
It will be interesting to see how much of an improvement Apple brings with Safari in iOS 5. The browser has always been relatively solid, yet currently lacks some of the even more basic features which can be found on many of the alternative surfing clients. A Magnifier-For-Safari-like feature seems unlikely, but we will have to wait just a tad longer to see what’s in store.
It’s available as ever from the BigBoss repository, and costs $0.99; certainly a must for those with sub-par eyesight.
In order to magnify your Safari webpages, you will of course need a jailbroken iPhone or iPod Touch. You can follow our step by step guide posted here to jailbreak your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch on iOS 4.3.5 using Redsn0w (or PwnageTool), or on iOS 4.3.3 using Redsn0w, PwnageTool, Sn0wbreeze & JailbreakMe (that last one being the easiest).
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