Scroll-wheel zoom for KDE and bad eyesight

So I’m finding it very hard to see these days. Its not getting better, and its very demoralising. Carpet bombing my life with reading glasses has helped, as has large fonts, bright lighting, high contrast, and large displays.  But even still its not enough.

Screen magnifiers are a bit of a pain to use. Tools like ‘kmag’ put a window in the lower left, and as you move the mouse it shows a larger version of what’s under it. But you lose the context. Continuing to magnify the screen or change font-size is counter-productive since you can’t get enough information on the screen. So what to do?

Well, lets try this. In your ~/.xbindkeysrc file, add these two lines:

"qdbus org.kde.kglobalaccel /component/kwin invokeShortcut view_zoom_in"
    alt + b:4
"qdbus org.kde.kglobalaccel /component/kwin invokeShortcut view_zoom_out"
    alt + b:5

And then restart xbindkeys. So what does this do? Well, when I press ‘alt’ and scroll (either with the scroll-wheel or the touchpad), the scroll is converted into a zoom up/down. When zoomed-up pan is activated, so if i move the mouse right or left, it follows the zoom. You can see in the video.

Is it enough? No, but my robot eyes were accidentally sent to Steve Austin some years ago so it will have to do.