Jim Hart
March 26th, 2009, 06:56 AM
This is mainly for the interest of those kind souls (Johnny B, Dave C,
et al) who responded to my pleas for help with a weird browser problem
a few weeks back. Problem is now solved - it was an accessibility
setting!
You may recall my problem was that on some (not all) web pages, some
(not all) elements were invisible. It turned out that in the
Accessibility options section of Control Panel my display was set to
high contrast - but a subtle form high contrast. I now know that
Microsoft XP offers dozens of different contrast settings, presumably
for dozens of different kinds of sight disability. If I had started
seeing everything in yellow on black I might have found the cause
sooner, but in my case mostly it looked normal.
My lucky break was emailing a technical friend when he happened to be
at a computer conference talking to a software security friend who in
turn put me in touch with one of his engineers who remotely took over
my computer for an hour or so and after a bit of head-scratching
tracked it down.
I'm still not sure how the setting got changed but I vaguely recall
bringing up an accessibility thing one day when I accidentally rested
on the shift key for too long. At the time I thought it only altered
the keyboard to help people who can't do two keys simultaneously,
didn't know it had anything to do with the display. And besides i
thought I had reset it to normal immediately but perhaps the high
contrast display thing got changed at the same time. Can't think what
else might have done it.
I'll know next time.
Jim
et al) who responded to my pleas for help with a weird browser problem
a few weeks back. Problem is now solved - it was an accessibility
setting!
You may recall my problem was that on some (not all) web pages, some
(not all) elements were invisible. It turned out that in the
Accessibility options section of Control Panel my display was set to
high contrast - but a subtle form high contrast. I now know that
Microsoft XP offers dozens of different contrast settings, presumably
for dozens of different kinds of sight disability. If I had started
seeing everything in yellow on black I might have found the cause
sooner, but in my case mostly it looked normal.
My lucky break was emailing a technical friend when he happened to be
at a computer conference talking to a software security friend who in
turn put me in touch with one of his engineers who remotely took over
my computer for an hour or so and after a bit of head-scratching
tracked it down.
I'm still not sure how the setting got changed but I vaguely recall
bringing up an accessibility thing one day when I accidentally rested
on the shift key for too long. At the time I thought it only altered
the keyboard to help people who can't do two keys simultaneously,
didn't know it had anything to do with the display. And besides i
thought I had reset it to normal immediately but perhaps the high
contrast display thing got changed at the same time. Can't think what
else might have done it.
I'll know next time.
Jim