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Protecting and Preserving Your Vision?
Poligraf asks: "All of slashdotters spend a lot of time in front of monitors. What are you doing to preserve your eyes? My issue seems to be not a declining vision, but fatigue after certain amount of time in front of the computer. It becomes so bad that I need occasionally to leave the room with computer and sit or lie down to relax for 5 to 10 minutes. What do you think of a full spectrum lights? Certain scientists swear that it is the best thing since sliced bread, others viciously rip their claims apart. Has anyone used these? What is your experience? What other methods can you come up with?\"
I read Slashdot on a line printer, you insensitive clod!
My vision varies widely over the day, especially after staring at a CRT for 12 hours. But then, I have diabetes... have you had your blood sugar checked?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
you may infact need glasses. Stimatism(sp) initially presents itself as eye-tiredness then little "grey" patches in you vision (like a spot of dust on a camera lense) when you are very tired. So do yourself a favor and have your eyes tested, I did and can once again sit at the box for long periods.
--
"we live in a post-ideological world..." - Billy Bragg.
It becomes so bad that I need occasionally to leave the room with computer and sit or lie down to relax for 5 to 10 minutes.
There's a law in Brazil which allows a five minute pause every one hour so the person can leave the PC.
It's not "bad". It happens. To a lot of people.
At Ac Lensthey are selling Computer Vision Glasses.
Quote: "These glasses have a special tint that helps to reduce glare and the intensity of the light produced by the average computer monitor, and a special UV coating that blocks UV rays produced by monitors and flourescent lighting." Sounds like Just what you're looking for to me.
Also, You might want to look into getting a Glare Screen, there's a good one at
FutureShop.
Quote Again: "VisionGuard XL, Glare Filter with Radiation Barrier. Relieves eye strain for healthy vision. Reduces glare up to 99%. Fits regular and Flat screen monitors 14 " to 17"." Looks again like it will solve your problem. AndrewM
6. You need to take these 5 minutes breaks before your eyes get tired. You don't have to leave your desk, just look around, close your eyes for a while, etc.
First, you need to go 100% digital. By this I
mean an LCD with a DVI or ADC plug. Forget about
anything with a traditional VGA connector.
It should go without saying that you MUST run
at the native resolution.
Pick an LCD with wide-angle viewing, such as the
excellent 20" Apple Cinema Display at 1600x1024 or
the 23" Apple Cinema Display HD at 1920x1200.
Don't cut corners on this -- I know you're tempted!
Now get rid of cheap flourescent lights. I suppose
you can keep the fancy 15 kHz ones. Avoid the
regular 60 Hz flourescents.
Adjust monitor brightness to match room lighting,
but wait... room lighting needs to be somewhat
low. At low light levels, your eye is less
sensitive to flicker. The eye does a kind of
time integration over a pulse stream to work;
the time constant varies with overall brightness.
What I do to relieve eye strain is to look away from the monitor every few minutes. Whether it's looking at the keyboard while I type (which I don't have to do, I can touchtype with the best of them), or look at your cubicle wall, your feet, anything that will have your eyes change focus. Doing this for even just a few seconds is a tremendous help (and I too suffer from diabetes, and if I stare at a monitor for too long my vision just goes blurry).
It's better to burn out than to fade away
Don't do that "one thing" that makes you go blind. And while we're on the subject, stop looking at pron on the computer all day. That'll cut your screen-staring time down at least by 75%
I've got an astigmatism in both eyes and have problems with declining vision (just as a result of aging unfortunately) and eye fatigue from looking at monitors. Other than the obvious - wear my glasses when using the computer, take breaks away from the computer etc - I set up my sight lines to have various things at different focal depths.
;) - this is just off the top of my head.
I put up a number of pictures on the walls near the monitor and I make a point to look at them every few minutes (a Kandinski, a Renior and a picture of Liv Tylor in a school girl outfit... sigh... a couple of minutes pass...). Anyway, by looking up every few minutes it allows my eyes to focus on things at different depths. I also look out the window as often as possible. When I use my laptop, I arrange it so I have a view.
Its simple but I find it helps. The anthropologist in me can't help but point out that from an evolutionary standpoint, the muscles in the eye were not designed to focus on one plane of depth all the time. Complex environments (forest, savanna etc), constantly moving around and generally not looking at something three feet in front of you for 6 to 16 hours a day probably created a eye muscle that can adapt quickly, but probably didn't create one that is designed for endurance - holding a single plane of focus for hours and hours. Not that I'm siting a reference here - pun
But the differing focal depths thing works. I do it when I read too.
Previous posts have made suggestions to get your vision checked to see if you either need glasses or you need your prescription changed. I'd definitely opt for that with the suggestion that, in the meanwhile, you bump down your screen resolution and sit further away from the monitor if possible.
The reason I suggest this is that your eyes require no effort in order to focus on objects in the distance, but require the contraction of the ciliary muscles in order to focus on objects that are close up. This response, like any other muscle response, can fatigue if it's held for a long time.
A lot of Visine may help as well -- if you are spending a lot of time in front of a monitor you are probably blinking a lot less, too.
Good luck!
"Max, come over here. French-Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone." - Dutch Schultz
Back when I used glasses. Just shy of needing them. I came across a need to walk about a mile or so between two places and back each day. With geography and parking being what it was, I'd probably have spent more time driving than walking. It turned out that just being outside and having the ability to look at things at close intermediate and far distances improved my vision over a couple of months. I was due for an eye checkup during this time, and the optimologist confirmed that this sometimes happens, and my theory that the lens stiffens and the muscles weaken through disuse might have some basis in fact.
I use to have a guy that would describe everything on the screen for me so I wouldn't strain my eyes but the costs became prohibitive so I had to let him go. Now I have a guy in India doing it for a 1/10th the cost. It would be the perfect solution but the phone bills are killing me. Also, porn is not as stimulating.
I got my eyes checked a few months ago, the first time in ages, and computer use has absolutely speeded up the deterioration to my vision.
Not only has be myopia speed along as its typical pace, she also said I have developed astigmatism from my (apparently) near-constant computer use over the years. and i'm only 19..
They prescribed me some long distance (which i only use rarely, since I refuse to give in..) and some close-distance glasses that should the progression of the computer damage. I used them for a while, though they seemed not to do much in the way of helping.
The only way really to prevent this is to take breaks. up to 15 minutes, at least once a hour. Taking breaks can even help other aspects of your health, maybe if you combine them with some walking or other exercise.
I should listen to my old advice.
--- Kicking the Cheat since late 2002
90 degree is 45 to each side, which is not enough
:-)
for a decently wide monitor. With that Dell, there
will be subtle disturbing color and brightness
variations, especially near the edges of the screen.
That is, unless you sit back very far and line
your head up perfectly.
Also, is it free of dead pixels? (both kinds?)
I got my Apple Cinema Display shipped by mail,
and it arrived with 100% perfect pixels. There
wasn't a single stuck-on or stuck-off pixel,
and not even a bad sub-pixel.
If it is resolution you want, get 1920x1200
with the 23" Apple Cinema Display HD. ("HD"!)
Damn, I sound like an Apple ad... except my
Mac is running Debian of course.
You can use a PC with an Apple Display if you
like; it requires an ADC-to-DVI adaptor that
takes away the coolness of running power and
USB down the monitor cable. (ADC is DVI plus
25-volt power and USB pass-through)
I am rather nearsighted, but I wear corrective contact lenses all the time, and I used to work at the computer just with those. One day I visited my optometrist and he told me I would feel more comfortable working at the computer wearing reading glasses. I scoffed, I told myself I felt fine, and anyway I was too proud to adopt the trappings of old fogeyhood just yet. Until one day at the drug store I tried on a pair and was amazed at how much more comfortable it made it to see at close distances. Apparently my contact lenses refocus the light so much so I can see far distances, but it creates more strain when looking at near distances. The reading glasses counteract that. So for working at the computer and for reading, I wear my contacts *and* my reading glasses. It makes it so much more comfortable. I just got a cheap +1.25 power pair at Target, and they're not unfashionable, either.
I'm dealing with more vision problems right now, but I've found that viewing a monitor is MUCH more comfortable if you change the colors of your main tools to use black backgrounds with light text, usually green or yellow.
All good text editors and IDE's let you change the background/text colors. Same with telnet apps, etc.. I spend most of my time on win2K, and use a slightly tweaked version of the "High-Contrast Black" scheme. There are always a few apps that don't conform, but it's easy to switch back and forth, or if you have switchable desktops you can switch over for those few apps that are hard-coded to use black text.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
Viewing angle matters a lot if you want to avoid
eye strain, which was the whole point of this
ask-slashdot. It especially matters on a screen
that is nearly 2 feet wide. Apple gives you a
whopping 170 degrees, and it shows.
Contrast may matter a bit, but 350:1 is enough.
Remember that 8-bit per channel video limits
the output anyway. I smell marketing.
Brightness is useless unless your room lights
are too bright. Any monitor you can buy is
brighter than you should need. If your room
light is way too bright and you are stuck with
it, then yeah, maybe brightness could matter.
Fix your room lights.
Correction on the sizes:
1680x1050 $1299 20" Apple Cinema
1920x1200 $1999 23" Apple Cinema HD
It's terrible advice for a Windows-optimized CRT. These days, black-on-white is the standard. If you use white-on-black, the vertical lines will be a bit darker than the horizontal ones. The effect is especially bad with high resolution, high refresh rates, cheap analog cables, and any video card not made by Matrox.
Test your monitor now.
Periodically looking at 3D stereograms has helped me relax my eyes quite a bit. The regular exercise has even corrected an astigmatism, according to my eye doctor.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
A better solution than turning your resolution down, is to turn your resolution up, and increase the default sizes of all your gui stuff (display fonts, text zooming, icon sizes, menu width, etc, etc), turn on AA, and increase your refresh rate, as has already been said.
... she edits medical texts), and for years she suffered from the eye strain bit, with the whole 800x600 resolution crap, cause that made everything bigger. I helped her upgrade last year to an LCD with a proper refresh, 1280x1024, and fixed all the font sizes and layouts, etc etc. She saw immediate improvement in ease of use.
My mother is a text editor (no, really
Low resolution introducies jaggies, which just worsens the eye-strain. (in my experience)
The specific fix will depend upon the specific cause. Try each suggestion here and elsewhere and see what works for you.
Switching to LCD if you haven't should be first. CRTs have more variance in output because LCDs are slower to darken. They flash.
Room lighting should be incandescent, rather than fluourescent, for the same reason: flash. Spectrum is, IMO, far less important than constancy.* If one thing flashing is bad, two things flashing at different rates is probably worse.
Work with room lighting and screen brightness to get it as comfortable as possible. You can't get around the problem of transmitted rather than reflected light, but you can minimize it.
The average optimal working attention time is around 25 minutes. Taking 5 minutes of every half hour off will keep you at a higher performance level as well as rest your eyes before you're forced to. Better to quit when you can find a good stopping point than when you can't see to read whether you've made mistakes.
Eye exercise to try while working: focus briefly on something far away. Outside if possible. Look at it for 30 second to stretch the muscles that had been set for close looking. Then look back and forth between something near and far, to "warm down" the eye muscles and keep them flexing. Then rest them by looking at something far again, for a few minutes.
Use paper when you can, especially for something you need to concentrate hard on. You'll lean forward and squint at the screen when trying to find a bug in code or something similar. That makes the transmitted light + flash (if applicable) problem all the worse, For reviewing something closely, print it. This especially for PDFs and such that are presented too small. If you'd have to have it wider than the screen (ie. use your bottom scroll bar to read across the page) in order to see it comfortably, print it.
Don't use WYSIWYG black-on-white skinny little letters for lots and lots of reading. I can read 4 or 5 pages of that stuff on my 15" LCD before my eyes get tired. I can read 10 times as much using light grey text on dark blue background in plain old DOS style monospace font.
I'm firmly convinced about the constancy thing. I've done experiments with incandescent vs. fluourescent lighting and found fluourescent to be worse (though I can only hypothesize why that is). About the only prior work I could find to reference was by a guy that also showed fluourescent light caused cavities, so it was kind of an iffy proposition. But my data replicated some of his other claims, so it's not completely bogus.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Have you tried the various compact florescent bulbs? I recently went through a few, looking for one that was the "right" color. Incandescents are about 2750K, a good approximation of sunrise/sunset lighting. Some of the compact florescents are about 6000K, a reasonable approximation of high-noon sunlight. Those were too white for me -- seemed odd to have that color light inside the house, and made the whites on my LCD screen look a bit yellow by comparison -- but might be good if you like things more towards the blue. I ended up with a Philips bulb listed at 3000K.
The Straight Dope covered this subject in an interesting (but not completely conclusive) article.
One interesting tidbit -- he mentions a study that found that while monkeys with their eyes sewn shut and untouched monkeys (oh, to be in the control group!) did NOT develop any vision problems, monkeys with their eyes sewn partly shut -- so they could only see dimly -- became myopic.
That seems like a pretty good hint that you might want to take breaks from the monitor. As other posters have noted -- it's a good idea to refocus your eyes on objects at other distances frequently during the day, and this should help avoid the eyestrain (and the other problems you might not notice for a while...)
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
OK, I had laser surgery and it's the best thing I've ever done for myself. But, one thing I thought it would do was reduce my eye strain.
Bear with me.
I have a bad asygmatism (sp?). For going on a few months, my eyes started hurting pretty bad whenever I put on the glasses. I tried different glasses and still had the problem.
I figured it was time to fix my vision so I got the surgery. Good news: 20/15 vision (wuhoo!) Bad news: Now I had the 'I'm wearing glasses' hurt ALL THE TIME. It drove me freaking mad. I asked the doctor and he said "Maybe you should get glasses". That's where he lost me.
Anyhoo, my eyes are great now, here's why:
[drum roll]
I stared running. Outdoors. In the sunlight. With nothing but far away things to look at like mountains, sky, clouds, trees, OTHER PEOPLE, all illuminated by constant unflickering sunlight along with it's magnificent ultraviolet rays.
So, I say, to fix your eyes, buy some running shoes.
I don't have the reference pages right now, but....Most people's monitors are way too bright and have the contrast cranked up way too high. How do you know?
I've been having problems w/ eye fatige since the beginning of this year, and am getting to know my opthamologist fairly well. These are just notes I'm passing along from him as we try to get my workspace corrected.
some weeks/months ago we had a discussion about programmers having desks on an open floor vs. having private offices or semi-private cubes. I was one of the few voices in support of open floors, at the time, for the reasons of fasciliating team communication.
Well here's another argument for open floor plans. Yes, you get distracted more, when someone comes over and asks you something. This also makes you look away from the PC, look at a person, roll your eyes as a joke, look down in thought, et cetera.
I noticed this because a few times I had spent the whole day at work listening to music through headphones and noticed my eyes were getting tired. Why? I think it's because the headphones shielded me from the little distractions (like when someone walked near me or my manager wondered aloud about something.) Usually these events warrant a little turn of the head, which breaks up your tunnel vision.
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
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Does your hosting company offer WAP hosting?
This is why you have scheduled 5 minutes breaks every hour during the work day when you have sitting down terminal work (like computer work).
If there isn't a law that allows you this already (worker's protection), then make sure your employer understands how much more efficient you will work with these breaks, even though he/she is paying for them. In the end, your boss will benefit from you having 5 minutes break every hour.
This is really targetted at Computer Users who complain about how their eyes hurt, especially after a long day of staring at the computer monitor.
I have had 15/20 vision all my life, and I've also been a heavy user of computers since 1979. People ask how the heck I have maintained my eyesight. It is really simple: turn the brightness down!
Here are my tips for adjusting your computer monitor:
That's it. Note that if you are working on computer graphics, this will NOT make the colors bright and pretty, so you'll probably have to go back to the eye-killing settings. But if you're a coder who is just doing text and web browsing all day, USE THIS. Your eyes will thank you for it.
Even better: do the same thing I mentioned above, but with an LCD screen. CRT monitors are worse for your eyes than LCD.
If you're playing first person shooters like Quake, you will probably have to crank up the brightness dial. Just remember to turn it back down later!
A Quick Bit on Color Schemes
When I originally wrote this node, I was focusing only on monitor settings. The above works fine for any monitor going back to monochrome CRTs from the 1970s, but with the advent of configurable color window managers like Windows where you have a choice of color settings, I have one more piece of advice. Get off that default scheme!
Ever since Windows 1.0, there has been a default color scheme. Somewhere around Windows 2.0 you were able to change it, but most people never do it and they leave it with the default settings. These default settings are BRIGHT white backgrounds with the blue title bars. In my opinion, this color setting isn't optimial for your eyes. Of course, we're not just limited to Windows, but since the majority of people use it, I'll at least start with it for my point.
Without going into technical and difficult to apply color preferences, I suggest trying one scheme that has been in Windows since Windows 95: the 'Plum (high color)' scheme. The point of using this scheme is that the window decorations are not the typical bright grey, and the window backgrounds are off-white. You may not care for the purple accenting, but that's not the point of this scheme, in my mind. Give it a shot for an hour and see if it works for you.
What I've strived for is the perfect balance of colors on my desktop. A lot of people don't know how, and don't bother with adjusting their appearance settings. Granted after you've been using one scheme for a while, it might feel too foreign to have a different scheme. But try it, it might help even more.
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
Hear hear! Far easier on the eyes. I use a green-on-black KDE theme all the time, and KDE 3 is now much better and more consistent about its handling of non-standard foreground/background combinations than KDE 2 was.
They certainly should. Unfortunately Eclipse, which I use all the time, does not - but I've logged a feature request and it's being worked on. And a lot of applications which should know better (e.g. Mozilla) don't pick up their theme colours from KDE.
My personal pet peeve is websites which set foreground colours but not background colours or vice versa. Even the specification document for CSS2 fails on this one - it doesn't specify a foreground colour for links, so on my screen the pale green links on the pale blue background are virtually unreadable.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
I have been hooked for about five years on GE Grow-n-Show bulbs. They're available as a standard light bulb form factor and as a flood-light. They're very purple when not lit, but the light they put out is a beautifully pure white approximating sunlight. Everything viewed under them just looks unnaturally crisp, and of course the plants love 'em. Also, you can stare right into the bulb and read the wattage rating printed on it without feeling like you're staring at the sun.
I think they may have dropped the Grow-n-Show name recently (probably felt that it was attracting narco-terrorists or some such) but the packaging is the same. They cost almost twice what normal 'soft white' bulbs do, and I think they only last half as long, but they're still an incredible bargain in my book.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?