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Computers, Long Hours and Vision Problems?
msid asks: "I have been computing for almost 10 years, starting back in 1996 when my father bought me my first computer. In the process, I fell in love with computers and got stuck with them. The last year though has been a real challenge for me. I sleep 5 hours, in average, per day and I spend more that 15 hours in front of my laptop's monitor (a 17" TFT Widescreen), either programming or reading. I have never had 'problems' with my vision up until now. Do you have a specific way of using light sources in your workspace? I have heard of special glasses for computer users. Should I use them or not?"
"A week ago, I checked my eyes and I found 0.25 astigmatism in both of them. They told me that this is not necessarily a problem, and it is mainly due to the intensive computer work. The actual symptom is that I lose my concentration more easily now. Also, the lighting of the monitor is killing me, especially when combined with a white background. Since I am willing to continue working in the same pace that I do now, what do you propose? Is there a habit that you follow to relax your eyes? Is there a way of preventing vision problems?"
I found that dual monitors with different sync rates give me headaches
I've been a regular over at the AVSForums for years -- I'm a confessed home theater geek/snob. A few years ago someone mentioned that they had a light source behind their TV -- just a soft white light. In total darkness, the white light reduced eye tension as it allowed the eye to go from the bright TV to a gradient light to the dark wall, and it also increased the visible contrast of the TV.
I started doing it immediately (Standard Definition) and have always increased my use of it as time goes on. My current theater is a projector, and I have a soft light behind my screen matting. I definitely find less eye strain if I have the light on.
About 2 years ago I tried it with my computer monitor (I'm a dual monitor user on the rare occasion that I'm not using my PDA; PC use is down to less than 5% of my computing time). I can say that I have less eye strain for sure when I use the soft lighting.
I tried to do a quick Google search but my PDA won't let me display any articles that talk about the light behind the display. Maybe someone with a real PC can find one and post a link -- I'm sure I've seen studies backing up the usage of the light behind the display, but I don't have any links for now.
On a tinfoil hat conspiracy sidenote: I was an eye glass wearer for a very long time. My vision deteriorated every year or two it seemed. I stopped wearing glasses a few years back and tried some of the eye exercises (as a friend recommended) and I was able to drop my driving restriction and I pass every eye test I've taken for the past few years -- without my glasses on. Anyone else have similar problems with glasses?
I am prone to migraines and also have astigmatisms in both eyes. I work 40 hours a week in front of computers and then use a computer at home 20+ more hours a week. I used to wear contacts in high school and I found glasses let me work a lot longer and reduced the number of triggered migraines I got (for what its worth).
-everphilski-
I'm nearsighted and I make it a habit to not wear my glasses when I'm at the computer, the upshot being my vision has actually improved slightly over the years. I also try not to stare at the monitor for extended periods; about every 5 minutes I let my eyeballs to break the lock on the monitor.
Hopefully you can find some of that useful. I'd also suggest looking at this artcile, which contains helpful suggestions.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
There's probably more that can be done, but with just those steps you should be able to go a bit longer between visits to the eye doctor.
What are your other light sources? Natural or Flourescent? Flourescent lighting can sometimes hurt your eyes, because they refresh at a rate different from your display, no matter if it was CRT or LCD. If's a question of the combined frequencies between the display and the lighting. Polarized lenses may help, but I found it simpler to just change the light source back to incandescent when I had a problem with flourescent lighting.
Five hours of sleep per night is NOT enough. Despite what you think and what you hear from your friends, you need more sleep. From wikipedia on sleep deprivation, "Lack of sleep may also result in irritability, blurred vision..."
Go to bed.
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
Use a high refresh rate.
Don't the resolution so high you need the screen up close to your face to read it without squinting.
Keep the ambient light low so you can have the screen's brightness down low.
I use grey as the default background color rather than white.
The last two go together pretty well and I've found them to have a more noticeable impact on eyestrain induced headaches than the first two.
Same here. I've been into computing since '79 (so, 27 years and counting). Keep refresh rates over 75 on your monitor, and text a comfortable size.
One of the useful things you can do if you sit by the computer is exercise your eyes (as explained at this place). It's no replacement for getting out and looking at distant objects, then near, in rapid succession, but it all helps. I've still got 20/20 vision after all this time, and I've spend a goodly portion of those years behind a console. The earlier behind an old TV set, as that's what the early home computers here used.
I agree.. there is no proof that computer can damage your vision, in fact, in my close family, I'm the only one who does not need glasses, and I'm the only one spending more than half of the day (24 hour period) in front of a computer...
About special glasses, I asked a doctor about those, he told me they are just BS, so I guess is just preconditions you have... maybe some things can help get the problem worst, as if you make your eyes work too much, say low light conditions, or too bright (I guess)
That's only true if you're moderately short-sighted, and can still manage to read the words on the screen without correction.
If you're as severely short-sighted as I am, you'll end up hunched over the keyboard with your nose an inch away from the monitor. That can't possibly be good for you.
Have you read the Moderation Guidelines Addendum?
If you have thin corneas, you definitely want to wait for your vision to stabilize for a couple of years before undergoing LASIK. They might be able to zap you once, but they won't be able to do it twice if need be.
I'm not an expert, but I read that sitting in front of a monitor for a long time has (at least) two effects on your eyes:
- you blink less often which dries your eyes. This in turn allows bacterias and things like that to enter your eyes, causing deseases.
- you fixiate a near point (your monitor) for a long time, so your eye muscles have to work very long. A muscle contracted for an extended period of time changes from aerobic to anaerobic metabolism that produces acid in the muscle.
You should avoid both of this by
- training yourself to blink often (wasn't there a slashdot story about a program that generates stimuli that after some training make you blink automatically ?).
- Relax your eye muscles from time to time by looking away from your monitor and fixiating a far point (for example the sky if possible).
A program like workrave might help, not only your eyes but also your hands/arms to avoid RSI.
Please correct me if I'm wrong about this, as I said I'm not an expert.
Some tips from a 20-year computer user and coder:
Actually, when your optometrist/laser surgeon are evaluating your vision to see if you're a suitable candidate for the procedure, one of the key elements that is a factor in making the decision to go forward is the stability of your prescription.
So, I would say, no. If your vision is gradually deteriorating from year to year, this will probably not help you much for long, if at all from a practical standpoint.
My vision was crap beforehand (-5.75 in the left eye and -5.50 in the right -- everything was a fuzzy blur beyond about a foot from my face). It's 20/20 now in both eyes. But going to surgery, it hadn't changed once in over 12 years.
Your prescription will still probably change again as you age, even after the "permanent" correction. Upshot being, you'll probably need reading glasses once your eyes go through their next big change, which according to my optometrist is somewhere in the mid-forties to -fifies for most people.
That said, it's still worth every penny, if you can get it, for all those years of unaided viewing, IMO.
But don't take my word for it. Talk to your doctor, there may be something they can do for you. If nothing else, they may be able to surgically correct your eyes to the point where you can go without glasses for a few years. If not, you may be able to at least scale back to much thinner, non-Coke-bottle lenses after you get zapped.
If you never make mistakes, it's probably because you're not doing anything.
> Also, the lighting of the monitor is killing me, especially when
> combined with a white background.
Yep, that'll do it. White backgrounds are distilled evil. You don't notice it so much on paper (although, even there, the cheaper, more yellowish paper used for mass-market paperbacks is easier on the eyes over extended periods, and even the dull white of mass-market hardback fiction is not as taxing as the blinding-white of textbooks and such), because the paper is only reflecting whatever light is shining on it, and you don't have to use a high-wattage halogen lamp all the time.
On the screen, though... if you're going to be spending *that* many hours in front of it, you want to go with a low-contrast (or possibly medium-contrast), light-on-dark setting, rather than high-contrast light-on-dark. The traditional amber-on-black used by a lot of dumb terminals is pretty decent on the eyes, but I've found that wheat on dark slate green (something like #FFE6BC on #294D4A) is even better. Set your system colors to this (if you use GTK, the eMaCs theme will do; for Qt or Win32 you can just set the colors directly) for at least a week, and then see if your eyes are doing better. You will also want to set your terminal emulator to use the system colors, and your web browser (and turn using the page author's colors off, so that *all* pages use your colors). Most reasonable applications will just pick up the system colors and use them automatically, e.g., any vaguely recent version of OpenOffice will just automatically use them (on the screen, by default; on paper your documents will still come out black-on-white, as you would want, and of course if you specifically change the color of anything, it appears in the color you specify).
You will *occasionally* have to work with white backgrounds, e.g., when doing image editing, but unless you're doing that sort of thing for a lot of hours, it isn't such a big deal, although after a few years of using softer colors you may eventually get to the point where you physically recoil at black-on-white.
Also you should try to sleep a little more.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Also, nearsightedness means you can see that deer across a field pretty well. You'd only run into trouble trying to 'read' the cave painting about the hunt.
r efrn/u14l6e.html
Stop spreading false information. Here is a link for you so you can learn.
http://www.glenbrook.k12.il.us/gbssci/phys/Class/
Nearsightedness is when you can see things NEAR to you.
I hope you get modded down down down
There are a few specific exceptions, like looking directly into sunlight and laser light, but other than this, reading in dim or bright light will not change the health or function of your eyes...It may feel more difficult to focus if the lighting is suboptimal, but this has no permanent effect on the structure of your eyes. Likewise, sitting too close or too far from the TV will have no permanent effect on your vision
- Dr Nicola Kim, Assistant Professor of Ophthamlology, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences
Dr Spock has also stated that children's eyes are not harmed either by being near to the TV, 'reading an excessive amount, reading in poor light, or holding the book close.'
Dr Robert Mendelsohn writes in How to Raise a Healthy Child, 'there is no scientific evidence that...reading in a moving vehicle..exposure to flashbulbs and strong artificial light...wearing another person's glasses...or going without your glasses will damage your eyes'.
In his book Bad Medicine, science writer Christopher Wanjek has expressed the belief that in the modern world there are only a few everyday activities that will lead to vision loss.
All above quotes taken from The Pedant's Revolt - Why Most Things You Think Are Right Are Wrong by Andrea Barham.
So basically, until there is significant scientific evidence to prove otherwise, you would have likely needed glasses after 30 years of computer use as you would after 30 years of burger flipping or limbo dancing.
I'd beware of any special 'computer-user glasses', not because they might damage your vision (unlikely, as the above experts would observe), but because they'll damage your wallet.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
High contrast colors, a dark background, and a large font really help me.
At least, they prevent my eyes from feeling tired and irritated after a day on the computer, and I've been headache free for years. (Don't know if it has any bearing on long term vision problems.)
On the other hand, I've occasionally borrowed friend's computers and felt my eyes fizzle and become sore in minutes. Any time I look at small text in black on a white background, it bugs me. (Don't even get me started on semi-transparent terminals. Why on earth anyone would want to turn down the contrast on their terminal and then past a bunch of distracting stuff all over the text is beyond me.)
I generally make the text large enough that i can easily sit back forty inches or more from the monitor and choose high contrast combinations (slightly off-white or bright green on black, white on navy blue or magenta, etc.) I also avoid anti-aliased fonts, but that's mostly an esthetic choice. In general, I find that if my font is so small that anti-aliasing is useful, it's *too* small to be comfortably read anyway.
Cutting overhead light helps too.
I am blessed with having an old University friend who is an optometrist and so when I moved into the area where he lives I popped into to see him. I should point out that this was my first eye test in 10 years, the previous one had been part of the selection process for military flying. I had just passed that test as I had difficulty with stereoscopic vision.
:)
Cut to last year and my mad irish friend (the optometrist) pionted out that I had almost no binocular vision due to a problem with my left eye that had gone uncorrected as a child (apparently I should have had an eye patch) and that although I didnt need glasses per se due to the nature of my work he would recomend glasses to reduce strain.
The point of all of this is that whilst I can read all the way down to the bottom of the eye chart,my own vision is almost completely one eyed which causes strain. I wouldnt have noticed this without visiting an eye professional and would have carried on increasing the strain. I now wear a very very low perscription pair of glasses which make an enourmous difference to how tired I feel at the end of a days work. The other thing I use is the mwm windowing system which allows me to change the fonts size of each window (cntrl left click) and thoughout the day the fonts increase in size as I get tired.
In the UK all VDU operators can recover the cost of a yearly eye check from their employers as a result of their work. As an IT professoional you know that you are making your eyes behave in an un-natural manner, and should take every precaution to protect them (and your livelihood). These are.
Annual Eye Exam from an optometrist (no dodgy low budget vision stores)
Take regular focal breaks from the screen.
Use large fonts, and sensibly contrasting colours for terms.
Reduce brightness on the monitor.
Dont go home and spend 6 hours watching the tube, or reading.
And no touching yourself because you'll get hairy palms and go blind
"There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society:To retreat ahead of it" Roland Barthes