Handling Eye-Strain?

mathgenius asks: "Usually I have no problems with this, but I've noticed again, as the stress levels increase I become more susceptible to eye-strain. I've reduced the contrast on my monitor, changed Mozilla to grey background, and enlarged my text. I am considering moving my desk to the window next, so that I am more likely to relax looking at a distance. Do people here have these problems? What have you found to help with eye-strain?"

Comments

Few Things

[TheFlyingGoat]

- Get up and walk around every 15-30 minutes, at least for a minute or two.
- Dim the lights in your office if possible... the reflection off a monitor gives me headaches.
- Stretch your neck and shoulders every so often. Eye strain can be associated with upper body tension.
- Get one of those screens that goes in front of the monitor to reduce glare. They also dim the monitor a bit more.
- Make sure you're sitting far enough back. I have a tendancy to sit REALLY close to the monitor. You'll get used to sitting a ways back and it will help a lot.
- Make sure you're getting enough sleep. Sounds silly, but I'm guilty of complaining about eye strain while not getting enough sleep (here I am, up at 4am)

Some thoughts

[Kris_J]

I haven't suffered from eye strain using computers, so I don't know how much help this is, but I have assisted on a number of IT ergonomics and occ. health and safety issues, so I have a good feel for these sorts of things.

I strongly suggest a high contrast, bright (digital) LCD panel as your primary screen. Eye strain is often not from bright light, it's from being forced to compensate for low contrast or fuzzy text. I also recommend a second monitor that's a CRT if your first monitor is LCD, or vice versa. This means that your eyes aren't being fed the same type of light all the time.

I also recommend against desk lamps unless you're reading a lot of stuff off paper. Lighting up your whole work area when you're looking at something that's producing (rather than reflecting) light is counter-productive. In fact, glare from light bouncing off the screen can be a major source of problems.

I wear glasses because I'm short sighted. The glasses I've chosen are photochromatics ("peril sensitive", they get dark in bright light). At their clearesst setting they're about a 5% shade and they reduce a lot of glare. If you already need glasses, you may wish to try something similar. They're also great for driving at night as they reduce the glare from oncoming lights.

Some hints

[richie2000]

Upgrade from CRT to LCD monitor.
If you have any flourescent tubes for lighting in the office, replace them with regular bulbed fixtures.
If you keep the CRT, check your screen frequency and set it as high as it will go - 75Hz is a bare minimum.
Try lowering the resolution, it will make you squint less and will allow you to up the freq some more.
See an optician. You may have a latent eyesight problem that's crept up on you slowly.

Avoid GUIs, choose a tranquil "anti-desktop"

[Florian]

I had the same problem as you. The major source of visual stress and annoyance are GUI desktops with their multiple color, countless toolbars, flashy icons, blinking & popping up messages.

My solution grew over years switching from Window Maker (1998) to 9wm (1999) to larswm (2000) to ratpoison (2001) and since then is what a famous freshmeat editorial calls an "anti-desktop".

Here is the Tao:

• Run all windows fullscreen and without decorations with a WM like ratpoison (or Ion or larswm)

  Nothing then distracts you from the program you work in, as opposed to a typical GUI desktop where diverse window/tool/status bar consume up 50% of screen estate.

• Run CLI/console programs wherever possible.

  Since CLI programs all use the same font in only one size, few colors (which typically can be customized and thus streamlined to a useful minimum), they offer a visual tranquility that is hard if not impossible to achieve through theming in GUIs

  I essentially do all my work in a GNU screen session inside an rxvt, with a couple of open zsh shells plus vim, mutt, elinks, slrn and aumix.

• Choose a good, readable, big console font,

  I was dissatisfied with all available choices and designed my own one called pxl 2000. I use the large 20 pixel size variant which gives me 92 characters per line on a 1024x768 pixel display

• Use white text on black background

  Black backgrounds are the most tranquil backgrounds possible (dark blue might be an alternative for some people). Since monitors do not reflect light like paper, but are light sources themselves, using brighter backgrounds is almost the equivalent of looking into a neon lamp your entire day. If you use CRTs, black backgrounds also reduce flicker and radiation.

• Use textmode web browsers wherever possible

  A major source of visual stress is browsing the web with its flashy and page layouts that change (and thus constantly force your eyes to readjust) with every hop from site to site. Textmode browsers like lynx, w3m, links and elinks streamline the web to one, always consistent page layout (elinks offers the neat feature of switching table rendering off on the fly) in your preferred, fixed-size console font, and allow to concentrate on the real textual information of the web.

• Use a dark grey, non-flashy color scheme for the legacy GUI applications you still need

  Configuring GUI applications to black backgrounds and white text typically creates compatibility problems (i.e. unreadable widgets) because some application programmers didn't think about such a setup. So the best compromise is to configure all GUI widgets to a dark grey background with white menu text. The get color scheme consistenty across Qt and GTK applications plus Mozilla, create a color scheme in the KDE Control Center and click the option "Apply to non-KDE applications".

-F