Video Magnification System for Seniors?

c4tp's friend asks: "Recently my Mother informed me that my grandmother's 80th birthday is approaching. She suffers from glaucoma and it is rather hard to read small text for her. The consensus with our family is to buy her a video magnification device, but the ones I found online were at the minimum of $500 (US), a bit steep for me (and my family). So what I am asking basically, is there a way to build/assemble the parts these retail devices use for a cheaper price?"

Re:THIS IS NOT ON A COMPUTER SCREEN

[Gudlyf]

Ah...that's what I thought. Like I said below, have you thought of using a cheap overhead projector (like this one [wisc.edu])? I've seen them on Ebay for under $50.

My wife's grandmother had issues with her hearing, so we started to send her faxes instead of calling her. If her eyesight started to fail, we could put transparencies into her fax machine and set her up with a small overhead projector in a back room. When she had a hard time reading the fax, she'd just put it on the Dukane in the back room to read it off the wall, which was plenty big for her to read. This would even work with single-page documents, where she could feed them into the fax as a copier, which would put the text on the transparency. This of course wouldn't work so well for books and newspapers.

Cheap camera/tv setup

[fuzzy1]

http://www.x10.com camera to tv
typically $80 to $150 and spam sales
frequently. Work fine as wireless
so you can move around with it.

I have used it to videotape meeting notes
from the whiteboard.

rcb