Ask Slashdot: What's Out There For Poor Vision?

hackwrench writes: I like to read on my computer, but when I resize text to be comfortably big, web pages and browsers handle it badly, and some applications don't offer an option to enlarge. Some applications even are bigger than the screen, which Windows doesn't handle well. Lastly, applications consist of bright backgrounds which feels like staring into a headlight. Windows' built in options like magnifier are awkward. What tools are there for Windows to increase text size, make things fit inside the screen, and substitute colors that windows use?

Comments

Use a larger monitor.

[Anonymous Coward]

In this day and age, large monitors are cheap, and you can even use a flatscreen TV as a monitor. Fix the problem with hardware, not software, and you won't have to rely on the OS or the application to support you.

Re: Use a larger monitor.

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried setting a lower resolution?

Re:Use a larger monitor.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

In the 'large monitor' vein, you can either go for one that just has enormous pixels(there are some 1366x768 and 1920x1080 panels that smear those pixels over a pretty enormous area) or, if other constraints demand it(in a laptop, say) shoot for something with a resolution that is an integer multiple of the one you actually want to use. Non-integer scaling can be done more or less tastefully; but simply doesn't have a 'correct' solution. Integer-multiple scaling is both easier and produces better results.

Also, if you can, turn the brightness down. Monitor manufacturers love setting the backlight to 'suntan'; because it makes the colors look more vibrant, the ghastly reflective screen look actually usable, and allows them to print a more impressive contrast ratio on the box without technically lying. If you have enough control over your computing environment, you ideally want a matte display, with the backlight low enough that the apparent brightness of white areas on the screen is about the same as the whitespace in a book under comfortable reading conditions. You will need a decent screen to actually do this(the cheap seats turn the brightness up because it's the only way to keep darker colors from just becoming indistinguishable; but better panels are up to it). You also want to avoid having to deal with glare from other light sources on the screen, since that will force you to punch the brightness back up.

Re:Use a larger monitor.

[cyberspittle]

If you are using a 19" 1080p display, perhaps you may want to use a 23", 25", or larger 1080p monitor. Likewise, if you are using 720p display. If you have a resolution on a bigger monitor, it will scale up nicely. If you have a laptop, I feel your pain. Might want to use an external monitor when possible.

Re:Use a larger monitor.

[Lumpy]

go straight to a 32" 1080P TV as it's cheaper than a 25" monitor

Re:Use a larger monitor.

[Anonymous Coward]

The asker also said something about white backgrounds blinding him.
Would you now suggest he get a new pair of eyes for that instead of complaining here?
Some people *do* have problems an optometrist can only help a bit with, far from eliminate.

Re:Use a larger monitor.

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, if you can, turn the brightness down. Monitor manufacturers love setting the backlight to 'suntan'; because it makes the colors look more vibrant, the ghastly reflective screen look actually usable, and allows them to print a more impressive contrast ratio on the box without technically lying. If you have enough control over your computing environment, you ideally want a matte display, with the backlight low enough that the apparent brightness of white areas on the screen is about the same as the whitespace in a book under comfortable reading conditions. You will need a decent screen to actually do this(the cheap seats turn the brightness up because it's the only way to keep darker colors from just becoming indistinguishable; but better panels are up to it). You also want to avoid having to deal with glare from other light sources on the screen, since that will force you to punch the brightness back up.

It's incredible how many people don't realise this and do exactly the opposite.

1) Of course you need to be able to read, but the least strain on your eyes comes from dim as readable, just as the least strain on your ears comes from quiet as audible.

2) There is no benefit whatever to working on a reflective screen (except perhaps if you are testing something for viewing on a reflective screen - in which case my sympathies). You want to see what's behind the glass, not what's in front of it.

3) Light behind you will also give you extra trouble making out what's on the screen or even focusing on the screen. Aim light on what needs light to be seen, not on other sources of light. It helps if you don't adhere to the contemporary fashion of interior design in hospital grade white and metallic - we haven't evolved

Re:Use a larger monitor.

[gbjbaanb]

and possibly way more importantly - ensure there's no bright light source behind your monitor - like a window. You should ensure the contrast differential between monitor and background is roughly the same

Re:Use a larger monitor.

[thegarbz]

Other way around. Manufacturers make horrible glossy screens to increase apparent contrast and allow them to push the brightness to suntan since more brighterer = more betterer.

Re:Use a larger monitor.

[vtcodger]

I'd also suggest that the OP probably is smart enough to figure out on his/her own that a larger monitor might help. Probably lacks either the cash or the room for a big screen. Or both

Reading glasses might help, and they're cheap. (At least in the US). But they tend to focus uncomfortably close to the screen

One thing that might help in some cases is selecting all the text of interest (Edit, Select all). That sometimes helps with the preposterous low contrast color schemes that many web site designers seem to think are stylish. (My belief is that most web page designer are to some extent insane). At least it will probably convert white backgrounds to some dark(er) color.

Also, many monitors used to have contrast/intensity controls. Can they be adjusted? Does that introduce other problems?

Re:Use a larger monitor.

[Anonymous Coward]

He needs to GET GLASSES ya blind old coot.

I get it, they suck. I am blind as a bat myself. I wear glasses though and SURPRISE I can see everything I need to without difficulty.

Re:Use a larger monitor.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It's a matter of taste; but I personally find that a slight 'backlight' behind my monitor(it's a white wall, I light it so that it is somewhere in the 50-75% as bright as on-scree-white range) can decrease eyestrain, especially at night. If the room is too dark, the brightness level that was good during the day becomes a bit too much as my eyes adjust, and I never remember to turn it down before I've noticed that my eyes are displeased. Definitely keep it subtle, though, full sunlight is not subtle, and is basically the devil for on-screen work.

Re:Use a larger monitor.

[MightyMartian]

That was my solution. I've got a cataract on my left eye (which will be removed very soon, yay!) as well as strabismus and in general am very short sighted. In the end I just went out and bought a 28" monitor. Other solutions seem kludgy and rendering can be quite awful.

Re:Use a larger monitor.

[tlambert]

go straight to a 32" 1080P TV as it's cheaper than a 25" monitor

A lot of televisions will only correctly negotiate EDID on the active input, and won't activate an input other than the primary, without first having a signal.

This tends to be a problem for laptops which are not persistent about negotiating EDID. This tends not to be a problem on Mac OS X, but in general, it's a problem for Windows, which is what the original poster said they had.

Toshiba or Samsung laptops, in particular, have a hard time driving some Samsung televisions, Dell HD monitors, and LG televisions. Mostly these screens tend to not be multithreaded in their electronics, meaning that they won't negotiate the EDID on an inactive (unselected) input when the computer is coming up, and those laptops, and many desktops, aren't very persistent in their attempts to renegotiate until they get an answer.

You're typically better off with a monitor than a television, if you plan to hook it up to a computer, even though there's a tendency towards higher expense compared to the televisions.

Re:Use a larger monitor.

[Anonymous Coward]

The asker also said something about white backgrounds blinding him.

This is primarily caused by improper lighting in the room. If the white backgrounds are blinding him, it indicates the ambient light level in the room is far too low for how bright his monitor is. He should decrease the brightness of the display, increase ambient room lighting, and make sure that bulbs are not "bare" but rather covered with some sort of shade or otherwise blocked from direct line of sight (both to the viewer's eye and the screen).
During daylight hours, the general rule of thumb is that the light level inside should match the light level outside, which is somewhat counter-intuitive. Yes, your lights should be brighter during the day than at night.

Also, it can help a lot to get some quality prescription reading glasses, as opposed to the $1 Wal-Mart special. As was already mentioned, a larger display will help make text larger (since they have a lower DPI) which can help reduce eye strain.

Re:Use a larger monitor.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Monitor brightness controls should be used immediately, they always come out of the box far too high; but for most other adjustments, you are probably better off in software: whether you want to geek out about color rendering(in which case the OS knows more about ICC profiles than the monitor does, and can work with a colorimeter to produce a device-specific one, rather than just the manufacturer's model-average one); or do some sort of assistive false color(in which case GPU driver color curve adjustments are probably for you).

Re:Use a larger monitor.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes and no. For this application, it's okay, as the TV will be used almost exclusively with the HDMI/DVI input. Another very easy way to defeat that is to use a VGA or VGA to component cable and set up the laptop to use your specified resolution on "generic monitor". I've got a VGA cable hooked up and only occasionally use the composite input with a camcorder to look at small things. Will become more of a problem when the camcorder dies and gets replaced with something with HDMI out.

One of the good things about the LED displays is that they have a wider viewing angle, which helps greatly with using a 48" tv a few feet from your face.

Re:Use a larger monitor.

[Wycliffe]

In the 'large monitor' vein, you can either go for one that just has enormous pixels(there are some 1366x768 and 1920x1080 panels that smear those pixels over a pretty enormous area) or, if other constraints demand it(in a laptop, say) shoot for something with a resolution that is an integer multiple of the one you actually want to use. Non-integer scaling can be done more or less tastefully; but simply doesn't have a 'correct' solution. Integer-multiple scaling is both easier and produces better results.
 

I agree with this for the large monitors as whether it's a 32" or a 64", it's still usually supports the standard 1366x768/1024x768 or something similar that most websites expect.

For laptops, one option on linux would be a desktop that is larger than the physical screen size. You could set the physical screen resolution to 640x480 but then set the desktop size to 1024x768 or some other normal resolution. You would have to scroll side to side to see that whole screen but you would have a built in zoom no matter where you go without "breaking" sites that expect resolutions larger than 1024x768.

Re: Use a larger monitor.

[tepples]

"Setting a lower resolution" was fine in the CRT era. But now that LCDs make up the vast majority of PC monitors, a lower resolution is most likely to produce a blurry picture.

Re:Use a larger monitor.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have some old-age vision issues. Nothing real bad. I bought a Samsung 1080p 32" tv, run from my HDMI port on my comp, and it cost only $219 on sale.

I remember the days when a 20" display cost $800+.

Re: Use a larger monitor.

[tepples]

Enlarging a picture using the monitor's built-in scaler makes it no longer nice, clean, crisp, square pixels but instead blur on top of blur.

Re: Use a larger monitor.

[davester666]

Glasses?

Re:Use a larger monitor.

[Pauldow]

A problem with using a large television as a computer monitor is that when viewing a standard size computer screen, say under 24", your eyes are moving around to see the various locations on the screen. If you start using 32" or larger screens, your eyes have reached the limit of movement, and you have to move your head to see what you want on the screen. This can start to cause some fatigue or dizziness when using the computer for a while.

I got a 32" 1080p TV for someone I do some work for, who has a tough time seeing, and he reported those problems. He also uses one of those kids keyboards with the big yellow keys. He still uses the built-in magnifier function in Windows 7, but I'll take a look at some of the suggestions in these comments for another option for him.

Re: Use a larger monitor.

[Ed Avis]

It depends on the monitor. Some will let you run at a resolution of exactly half and scale crisply, so that each pixel from the computer becomes a neat square of four pixels on the monitor. Sadly there are too many monitors which generate a blurry mess even when doing an exact integer scaling like this. (From my limited experience older monitors are better than newer in this respect.) Scaling in the video hardware is the same. It's from a misapplied idea that fancy scaling like bicubic is superior to the naive nearest-neighbour. That is true for photographs, but not for input images which are intended to have exact pixel boundaries. My first resort would be to set a font scaling of 200% in the operating system. If running Windows it may help to turn off Aero, so that (as above) you get clean pixel scaling and not blurring.

Re:Use a larger monitor.

[hackwrench]

Lowering the brightness of the display lowers the contrast. The main goal is to prevent eyestrain. If I strain my eyes, I can see smaller print.

Sunlight doesn't bother me but close fluorescents do. The lights, fluorescent in the kitchen, an array of incandescents in the bathroom, on the low ceilings of my apartment bother me, but not the lights in most stores with higher ceilings. I have prescription progressive lenses.

I'm looking at my laptop screen right now. I have a slightly larger 720 screen but it would be difficult to put it on the wooden tray table my laptop is on. If I got a block of text in a nice rectangle without having to deal with cropping or moving the mouse to view an entire block of text, that's a description, kind of, of what I want.

Re: Use a larger monitor.

[hackwrench]

Actually, my experience has been that when the resolution is decreased, the programs try to display things at the same size but with fewer pixels.

Re:Use a larger monitor.

[Lumpy]

So leave it on the active input. Works great for a lot of people

Re:Use a larger monitor.

[lott11]

Having to deal with some of the same problems that you have mention. One was do to the monitor that I use witch is a 32 inch 3D TV, and add to this that I am 7 feet from it. Make it hard to read text in some applications, so I did some of this things. In windows I use the scalier of DPI to 200 next reduce screen light by 30%, and I use text to speech. Had to change a few other things like removed Adobe Acrobat and now I use Foxit reader. When you use Adobe and text to speech reader any PDF is being read to you 4 to 6 times over and over. So replace it with Foxit reader the TTS reader will only read the text to you only one time. The TTS reader is free software the link http://www.sphenet.com/TTSRead... The other is to use 2nd speech center I had purchased this 8 years ago back then it was only $24.95. the advantages are it can turn any text file to and audio file, I use it before there ware audio books. It also has one other benefit that is that you can add and modify its dictionary as to it pronunciation. The voices are not like a human's, but you can purchase those individually. I listen to my e books wild driving to work, now days just use it in Linux OS under Wine. Now as to the voices I have only use the defaults since windows 95 + and Cepstral's William for Linux & windows at $115.00 for software each OS. And as to magnifier the unless you are going to spend some money, you are limited to some that just will not give but a simple interface. But on a good note you can adjust the windows magnifier to doc Ctrl + Alt + D on top or full screen Ctrl + Alt + F or the default Ctrl + Alt + L witch is the lens effect. The full screen is limiting on its use, but will do its job and it is free. hope this helps.

Re:Use a larger monitor.

[lott11]

Ho there is one more thing, the way text to speech works is to highlight the text & copy. On the text to speech engine set to look at the clip board that is it. It is the same for all versions free or payed. It will take some time to get use to the voice, but that is just like every thing in this world. I like the old Appi voices like the one on TTS reader, I do not like the new voices from MS. But like I stated to each his own, and hope this helps you out.

Re:Use a larger monitor.

[RockDoctor]

without "breaking" sites that expect resolutions larger than 1024x768.

Sites that "expect" a particular screen size and can't adapt to other sizes are inherently broken and shouldn't be used.

But hey

[smittyoneeach]

Why bring up U.S. foreign policy? Thanks! Don't confuse the tip jar with the spittoon.

Re:But hey

[Anonymous Coward]

What, you didn't read past the title? A stunning new low in /. literacy.

Re: But hey

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have low vision you don't see things going over your head.

Our CEO Had Poor Vision

[Anonymous Coward]

Our CEO had poor vision. We replaced her with a very small shell script.

Honestly.. not much I think

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you're actually blind, it's worse.

You'd think things would be getting more accessible, and they are software wise, but web wise.. forget it. A combination of web pages going all dynamic and javascript-y and screen reading apps being stuck in 1996.

What's Out There For Poor Vision?

[Nutria]

Optometrists. And "cheater" reading glasses.

Re:What's Out There For Poor Vision?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have no clue. OP obviously has a vision problem that cannot be corrected with glasses.

Re:What's Out There For Poor Vision?

[cyberspittle]

I use reader glasses. it was a great help. I didn't want bifocals, so now I have reader glasses for computer use and normal prescription for driving. Another option is to use a monitor with a bigger display for identical resolution.

Re:What's Out There For Poor Vision?

[Anonymous Coward]

or look through a small hole in a piece of paper.

Re:What's Out There For Poor Vision?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have no clue. OP obviously has a vision problem that cannot be corrected with glasses.

And that is obvious in the original post how? I've read it twice and nowhere does it explain the actual vision problem.

Re:What's Out There For Poor Vision?

[CastrTroy]

Finally somebody understands. Even with my someone decent vision, I never really got why people would buy super high resolution monitors. It really just makes everything on the screen smaller. You don't actually get any more usable space. You can use space on the screen more efficiently when there is higher resolution, but it doesn't scale linearly. You aren't getting 4 times more working space if you have a 4K monitor vs a 1080p monitor when the screen is only 20 inches. I admit that operating systems have gotten a lot better at handling higher resolution, so that things don't just end up smaller when you have a high resolution monitor, but there's a point where having a higher resolution doesn't make much of a difference and you'd be better off just getting a bigger screen.

Re:What's Out There For Poor Vision?

[tlambert]

You have no clue. OP obviously has a vision problem that cannot be corrected with glasses.

Ironically, one of the contestants on the most recent season of "America's Got Talent" used a technological workaround of wearing Google Glass, with a specialized application that worked around his macular degeneration by distorting the visual field into the "halo". Generally speaking, the brain can "correct" processing, including an image which is flipped upside down, in order to compensate for the image distortion in this particular case.

More on similar applications, here: http://www.visionaware.org/blo...

Re:What's Out There For Poor Vision?

[Anonymous Coward]

For contrast, think back to the old 9-pin dot-matrix printers compared to the later generation of 24-pin dot matrix (an old example). Same amount of text on the page, but each character had more dots resulting in a crisper image.

That's the main draw of a 4k screen for me. More dots per inch for text, making it easier to read. But the 4k screens are still a bit too expensive for my tastes, so I'm waiting until next year and I'll probably move up to a 30" (instead of the 27" 1080p that I have now).

On the flip side, 4k screens do give you the option to make text really tiny when needed.

Re:What's Out There For Poor Vision?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it obvious? He never said anything other than he likes to read on his computer, but can't.

Re:What's Out There For Poor Vision?

[gstoddart]

Yeah, no kidding. On my 23" monitor I already bump the fonts a little bigger so I don't have to try to make out tiny little text.

I've got pretty normal vision without glasses, but cramming 4x as much stuff into the screen isn't going to make it more usable for me. In fact, making the font smaller on the screen just gives me eye strain.

I know a guy who has a large monitor at home. It's not super high resolution (I assume it's just 1080p), but I think it's a 36" monitor or something like that, set back from his desk a little.

Going to ultra high resolution means I'd need a screen 4x the size as well.

Me, I'll stick with dual 23" monitors instead of going to higher resolution that I can't see. Cramming more text at a fraction of the size on the same sized screen offers me no benefit at all.

Re:What's Out There For Poor Vision?

[mellon]

Mod parent up. I started to find my monitor blurry despite wearing strong corrective lenses when I was about 40 or 45. It's hard to say exactly when because I didn't really notice for a while. Reading glasses don't really help for this if you are nearsighted, because the monitor is too far away--you need nearsightedness correction. But the correction of your regular distance vision lenses stops working for near-distance vision when you get old enough to develop presbyopia.

There are a number of ways to address this. You can get a pair of work glasses (I have a pair) that are a weak version of your regular distance vision prescription. This will allow you to clearly focus on a screen that's 24" (or whatever) away. Measure how far your eyes are from your screen with a tape measure and bring that measurement with you when you go to the optometrist.

Bifocals are a poor solution for this problem, because you really want your whole range of vision to work, not just the bottom half. However, you can get multifocus contact lenses if you wear contacts. These are a bit different than bifocals, and take some getting used to, but apparently work very well (I haven't tried them--I'm reporting what a friend who swears by them has told me).

Another thing you can do, as others have suggested, is get a really big monitor. This doesn't work as well as you might like with every operating system. I'm having great luck with a 40" samsung 4k display and a Chromebook, because ChromeOS does a stupid but effective hack to make it work: they tell the browser the resolution is half what it is, and use bigger fonts. My experience doing the same thing with Ubuntu has been less positive.

Re:What's Out There For Poor Vision?

[djbckr]

It really just makes everything on the screen smaller.

Sorry, not quite true. My mac with Retina display shows things at the same size as a non-retina display (if I leave the system settings alone). However, the clarity of the display is nothing less than amazing and it's immediately apparent to me the difference between the two, even without my reading glasses. It does occasionally have issues with programs that don't know how to handle high DPI, but I find those issues are pretty rare, and it's still usable though sometimes it looks a bit funny.

Re:What's Out There For Poor Vision?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. I advise my older clients to buy 'retina' Macs. I tell them that Windows is for young people with no money, good eyesight and lots of patience to fix the never ending problems. They all relate to that immediately.

Re:What's Out There For Poor Vision?

[Anonymous Coward]

All good suggestions.

I wear multifocus contact lenses, they are really just two lenses of different power, the left for up close, the right for distance. It sounds odd, but it works well.

I also have a pair of "computer glasses" that I use occasionaly. I bought Gunnar's on sale from woot... The tint helps reduce glare and the slight magnification does reduce eyestrain (for me anyway... YMMV)

I would love to get a big 30+" 4k display for my everyday use, but budgets...

Re:What's Out There For Poor Vision?

[mellon]

Prices are coming down. Mine was about $600, but I bet you can get one in a year or two for $400.

Re:What's Out There For Poor Vision?

[hackwrench]

Your comment should really be modded up. It's the first that I've seen that actually answers the question, though it will take me some time to assess how effectively.

Re:What's Out There For Poor Vision?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe in Windows.

But in an OS that can do scaling properly, the higher resolution makes everyhing more readable and less jaggedy, like they are on paper.

OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

Use OS X - it will happily zoom the screen for you dynamically, along with supporting a bunch of other accessibility options for poor vision (like voice over, increased contrast, etc)

Re:OS X

[Applehu Akbar]

The ability to zoom in to catch the smallest text is nice, but one of my most common requests from older computer customers is, "Can you make the text larger?" Windows is actually ahead in this area, with its global ability to change the size of all onscreen text. On Macs, you have to change the text size application by application.

Re:OS X

[pla]

"Since you obviously can't afford the trivially easy solution to your problem, a giant $400 monitor, allow me to recommend a solution that costs three times as much and doesn't address your actual problem".

Re:OS X

[tepples]

Does the "giant $400 monitor" come with a battery? If not, it won't help laptop users as much as font size options will. And no, OS X isn't the only operating system with font size options.

Re:OS X

[pla]

Where did the OP say anything about a laptop?

Re:OS X

[tepples]

Nowhere. I've just noticed this "everybody uses a desktop, and nobody needs to use a laptop because everybody drives" mentality, and I felt like reminding people that laptops still existed. I have a family member who uses a laptop and reading glasses and may benefit from a solution that works on laptops as well.

Re: OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

+1, go for a Mac and run Windows in a VM or on another system via VNC, if you need it. My eyesight is pretty bad too, so bad, I count as having a disability around here. However, with the help of the Magnifier and other Accessibility tools on OSX, I still manage to be at least as good as my coworkers (working as a lead software/game engineer) while dealing with the seemingly least accessible software packages I can think of.

Re: OS X

[hackwrench]

Windows has a "Magnifier" program. In order to see a continuous line of text you have to maneuver the mouse around a window in order to see all of it. In order to do away with all of that, the text has to wrap within a rectangular region before any magnification stage is implemented.

Not Making Sense

[phishybongwaters]

All browsers (computer, not assuming mobile) support CONTROL+ and CONTROL- to change font sizes. All modern OSs have a vision impared mode. Even your monitor likely has this feature. I guess it depends on the level of impairment really. But everything you complained about is fixable within your browser/OS. I'm not aware of an all in one turn it on and off easily solution unfortunately. One of my coworkers is vision impaired and deals with it in the manner I explained above. This might be a niche to be filled if there is no easy all in one solution. As for the pages and apps looking screwy when you mess with fontsizes..... I'm not sure anyone can fix that without redesigning the way we build software.

Re:Not Making Sense

[Anonymous Coward]

And since HTML separates content from appearance, all pages should look just fine. There is probably one or two STUPID MOTHERFUCKING IDIOTS who still don't get this and design their web pages to only work well when they look like they think they should look. But just blacklist those pages and never visit them again and you should be fine.

Re:Not Making Sense

[gurps_npc]

It's not just 'look screwy". it becomes effectively unreadable. Minor icons, pictures, and 2nd columns that are only used at the top end up taking 70% of the space, leaving the text in a small, tight column 30% of the monitor.

What we really need is the ability to increase the text size of just ONE small section.

Re:Not Making Sense

[jhecht]

Unfortunately, too many designers use tiny light gray type. CONTROL + and CONTROL - don't help much when the contrast is that low, and some designs don't expand enough to be easily readable.

Re:Not Making Sense

[Guy Harris]

Unfortunately, too many designers use tiny light gray type. CONTROL + and CONTROL - don't help much when the contrast is that low, and some designs don't expand enough to be easily readable.

If someone were to develop glasses that reduces one's ability to handle low-contrast text, it would be wonderful if all UI designers (including, but not limited to, Web designers) were forced to wear them while doing design work (and if any marketing and management types who interfered with the usability of the resulting designs were put to death immediately).

Re:Not Making Sense

[DancesWithRobots]

In Firefox, I bump up the font a couple points and it helps. CTRL+ and CTRL-, or CTRL help too. BUT if I follow a link to a new page it ends up in the smaller sized font. Not to mention, once you start playing with font sizes, a lot of web sites have windows (usually, but not always advertising) that cover the text, or the text inside those non resizeable windows "grows" behind the window--Like the /. videos window. Fact is, we've had computers on our desks, or on our laps for over twenty years now. People who were young when they first starting using computers are on the verge of needing a little help with their vision. By now it should be easy, intuitive, universal and platform agnostic.

Re:Not Making Sense

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like sunglasses? Or if you really want to reduce the contrast a ton, a welder's mask.

Re:Not Making Sense

[Guy Harris]

You mean like sunglasses? Or if you really want to reduce the contrast a ton, a welder's mask.

Anything to keep idiots from thinking that, for example, grey on black is appropriate for text that anybody would actually read.

Re:Not Making Sense

[hackwrench]

One or two? More like nearly everybody including Slashdot.

Glasses, contacts, lasik

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a solved problem, my friend.

Re:Glasses, contacts, lasik

[Anonymous Coward]

Clueless.
Refraction can not sure everything
by way of an analogy
"bad black and white film in the camera can not be made in to hi-res color with better lenses"

Re:Glasses, contacts, lasik

[Anonymous Coward]

Horrible analogy. The poster isn't loosing his color vision his vision is getting blurry and he needs to compensate by making everything bigger.

Can better lenses make blurry things clear? Why yes, yes they can.

I think the poster needs to visit the optometrist and get some bifocals.

Re:Glasses, contacts, lasik

[pla]

Can better lenses make blurry things clear? Why yes, yes they can.

Can better lenses reverse macular degeneration? Why no, no they can't.


Horrible analogy. The poster isn't loosing his color vision his vision is getting blurry and he needs to compensate by making everything bigger.

You realize that you typically shouldn't take analogies literally, right?

"Apples and oranges? The OP can't see! He doesn't need more fruit in his diet, he needs an optometrist!".

Re:Glasses, contacts, lasik

[Kinthelt]

Um, no. There are lots of ocular problems which are not related to refraction errors.

For instance, macular degeneration is the death of the most sensitive part of the retina. A person's peripheral vision is still intact, but the sharp middle part is gone. It is still possible to read, but you need to be able to magnify as the "high res" receptors in the eye are gone.

Re:Glasses, contacts, lasik

[tlambert]

by way of an analogy
"bad black and white film in the camera can not be made in to hi-res color with better lenses"

Avalanche Biotechnologies in Menlo Park and the University of Washington in Seattle have cooperative agreements, and have successfully used gene therapy to treat a number of retinal issues.

Including curing color blindness: http://www.neitzvision.com/con...

Re:Glasses, contacts, lasik

[kkruecke]

Lasik left me unable to drive lo these last 12 years due to starbursting, glare, and halos. Anyway, this article explains http://laserfitlens.com/bad-la... and talks about a solution using wavefront-design contacts that uses Dassault Systemes 3D software, an optical coherence tomographer and a wavefront aberrometer, not things you think in the typical O.D.'s office.

Re:Glasses, contacts, lasik

[BarbaraHudson]

Here's a contra-intuitive solution that worked for me (I've got PDR). On your smart phone, make the fonts the largest size, and use a hand magnifying glass. MUCH easier than using an on-screen magnifier, and you might be able to find an app for the website you want, which will be tailored to having a much narrower screen.

There's also the advantage of being able to read in bed, on the couch, wherever, because your phone and a magnifying glass are a lot more portable than even a laptop.

Re:Glasses, contacts, lasik

[mellon]

Lasik doesn't help with presbyopia.

Re:Glasses, contacts, lasik

[mellon]

Bifocals suck for computer work. Speaking from experience. You want near-distance reading glasses, not bifocals. These would have the same prescription as the bottom of your bifocals, but across the entire lens.

Re:Glasses, contacts, lasik

[CAOgdin]

Actually, not quite solved. It requires collaboration between the opthalmalogist/optician and the person.

I had terrible problems reading computer display screens until I worked with my optical experts and discovered the "reading" glasses are set for around an 18" focal point...but when I measure the distance from the plane of my eyes to the plane of the screen, it's about 25". If you're getting older, your "accommodation" (i.e., ability to do dynamic focusing on demand) diminishes, and so you're stuck with trying to focus about 7" in FRONT of the screen. That means the screen is beyond the point of best focus.

So, sit at your computer, in a chair you use often, with the display a distance away that is comfortable for you. Then, measure the distance between the center of the screen (irrespective of whether you can read that screen right now, or not) and the plane of your eyes (I have the measurement made with my eyes closed, so the tape measure can touch my eyelid; it helps to have a friend take the measurement for you). Take that number to your vision experts, and tell them that's you're preferred "focal distance" (the distance at which you want the best focus).

Those lenses will be useless for reading, because text will be all out of focus (too near the eye). You can have a pair of "reading" lenses, too...or, you can have bifocal lenses, which give you display-reading in the top half, and book/magazine reading in the bottom.

Incidentally, when you get older, and your lenses get "cataracts" (noticeable when oncoming cars, at night, have "startbursts" from the headlights), your lens replacement(s) will be fixed-focus at infinity, giving you great distance vision.

Re:Glasses, contacts, lasik

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, when I was a child, my grandfather always had a magnifying glass in his pocket and I liked to play with it. Now, I understand why and have one in my pocket too.

And for those who fail to understand, a magnifying glass doesn't just make things bigger, it allows you to control the focus.

My eyes are bad too and

[Anonymous Coward]

I use a 27" monitor, the NoSquint addon, and f.lux to dim the screen to softer colors at night. NoSquint is great because it can resize the entire webpage or just the text. There are also themes that can make your browser (I use FF) easier to read.

Re:My eyes are bad too and

[Applehu Akbar]

Low vision here too: 27" screen, and etext on a tablet for all books and magazines. I can have the font I need in the size I specify.

Re:My eyes are bad too and

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have trouble reading a screen, just but a pair of reading glasses. They're nothing more than magnifiers for close range. Cost is minimal and will be on the shelf for a few bucks/quid.

Re:My eyes are bad too and

[CAOgdin]

Avoid these like the plague. See an physician specializing in vision first, and optometrist or opthalmalogist.

Re:My eyes are bad too and

[rocqua]

Just want to throw in my support for f.lux

what sort of "poor vision"

[umafuckit]

@hackwrench it would help if you describe in what way your vision is poor. Vision can have different problems and these will have different solutions.

It's always been this way. . .

[DancesWithRobots]

I've always been aware that it's rare for technology to make any sort of concession for those whose dexterity or vision is below a certain "normal" standard. Raised black lettering on black panels. Tiny little ambiguous ports. Web pages that don't resize well. Pages too bright. (And yeah, I'm looking at you Slashdot.) I've been known to use sunglasses to view my monitor at night. I gave up trying to work the menu with those little hidden buttons. I sure do miss brightness and contrast knobs sometimes.

Re:It's always been this way. . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Bright pages usually help people with poor eye sight. The contrast is the same as for white on black displays, but the higher average brightness makes the iris contract, and that gives people with poor vision a sharper image. If bright lights cause glare in your vision, then you might have a cataract. Cataract removal is a routine operation. Don't complain about bright web pages, see a doctor.

Re:It's always been this way. . .

[dak664]

And tiny black slots on the side of black cases. I keep a flashlight next to the laptop so I can find them.
And blue on gray text on websites.

I use glasses half the needed strength so monitor and distance are equally blurry (I take off the glasses for close work and reading).
Windows 10, 1920x1080 with 150% increase in icons and text, at two meters to a 46 incher, works for me :)

Re:It's always been this way. . .

[DancesWithRobots]

My vision is fine. I see my eye doctor regularly and have had cataract surgery quite a while ago. Back in the day I found amber and green screens MUCH less stressful. A web site that doesn't support choices is a sign of snobbery or lazy programming. (IMO. But I'll stand by that decision under the tag that I make every post with, Mr AC.) And what are /. comments for if not complaining?

Re:It's always been this way. . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Easily solved - paint them with white nail polish.

There's keyboard shortcuts for the magnifier.

[jthill]

You can use win-plus and -minus to zoom in and out, and win-esc to end, if you didn't know that, try it.

Re:There's keyboard shortcuts for the magnifier.

[gurps_npc]

Mostly worthless. What happens 9/10 times is that the entire page resizes, rather than just the text. Pictures, ads, and whitespace areas end up taking 80% of the monitor.

Re:There's keyboard shortcuts for the magnifier.

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously didn't read the parent properly! He said WIN plus and WIN minus, not CTRL plus and CTRL minus.

He's talking about zooming the whole screen. I personally didn't know about this and its actually quite useful and convenient.

Zooming on webpages is hit and miss definitely, but next time, actually read the comment properly before you respond.

looking up short sighted on alphabet.com

[Anonymous Coward]

why strain our eyes on mislinked fascist wmd on credit cabal fear & hate mongership franchisees' digital diarrhea hypenosys? never a better time to consider ourselves in relation to one another & the spirit of creation? that's the spirit...

Bigger Pixels: Buy a TV.

[Anonymous Coward]

A full HD 50 inch TV has pixels twice as wide and tall as a typical desktop monitor. So buy that.

Re:Bigger Pixels: Buy a TV.

[ma i ude]

This, unfortunately. Scaling and dpi setting both fail due to an unholy mess of percent, point and pixel based measurements in both apps and web pages, and lazy web developers who assume everyone has the same MacBook they do. Get a large, low-res display (TVs around 32-50 inches would be ideal), run it at native resolution and make your OS believe it has the dpi of a smaller one.

Here's what you need to do

[jones_supa]

Freely scaling everything is still pretty crusty in most operating systems, so just get a display with a low DPI.

What comes to bright backgrounds, lower the brightness of your display and make sure that the surrounding room lighting is adequate.

Re:Here's what you need to do

[jez9999]

just get a display with a low DPI.

Good luck with that these days, with all manufacturers boasting about how many pixels they can fit into a tiny area for improved video performance (and screw text size!)

Re:Here's what you need to do

[PhunkySchtuff]

No, go the other way as high res as possible. Scaling in OS X on a Retina class screen is quite good. The default is to display @2x - 2x2 physical pixels is 1 "pixel" but you can scale up or down and it looks OK. On my 13" laptop, I run it at a resolution similar to a 15" and everything looks good. On a 27" desktop, you could happily run it at a lower resolution and everything will scale. Things like fonts etc are generally drawn at the native resolution, so they're sharp and crisp. If the app is retina-aware, UI elements are drawn properly, otherwise if not, they're scaled - but with a high-res display, the scaling isn't as much as an issue as if you're doing it at 72-100 dpi.

What's out there for poor vision...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ophthalmologists.

Color adjustments

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Tinkering with these settings will probably push you deep into false-color territory(unless you are comparing to a genuinely nice and regularly calibrated setup, reasonably recent stuff does a fairly good job out of the box); but all the GPU vendors offer the ability to to set a custom color correction curve for R, G, and B; as well as brightness, contrast, and gamma.

Helpfully, AMD, Nvidia, and Intel all arrange these controls somewhat differently(and sometimes rearrange them between driver versions); but if you have an even remotely recent GPU, you can substantially transform output colors to suit your taste. Unless you have some sort of specialist advice suited to your particular situation you'll just have to experiment, I have no idea what might be more or less comfortable for you; but this gives you control without whatever programs you are using ever having to know, support themes, or otherwise cooperate.

The GPU driver tools apply their transformations system-wide(unless the driver supports applying application-specific profiles for recognized games or video playback applications, again, driver specific); so they will really hammer the accuracy of image reproduction and the like; but they do offer the greatest control over applications that don't support themes, refuse to honor OS themes, or are otherwise touchy.

Partial

[Anonymous Coward]

Partial answer: Windows allows the user to switch to another color scheme, and "dark" is there to help you get rid of those headlights in your face. You can pick such a scheme, or start from one and fine tune from there.

Text size and readability is another matter. Today's browsers suck there, by design.

HTML was originally designed to address just that: it provided the content with 'loose' formatting guidelines such as 'this is meant to be a title', 'this is subtitle', 'this is plain paragraph text', 'show this in boldface if you can', that sort of stuff.
The browser was supposed to present that content, following the formatting guidelines to its best, given the actual display and its possibilities. Readability on whatever device was the primary goal, formatting coming second as far as it could be done. You could even have text-only browsers for non-GUI systems with a fixed character cell display. I think most Linux systems still come with Lynx installed today: a text-only browser you can use in a non-graphic console (90% of the Linux setups I work with are servers without even a GUI installed, Lynx was made to make it possible to still read HTML text on such systems).

What browsers and HTML itself are trying to do today (to my dismay, I must add) comes closer and closer to what PDF was actually designed for: present the given content with EXACTLY THAT strict formatting, to the pixel. If that makes the text unreadably small, or if it makes half of every line run off the screen, that's bad luck, but formatting comes first.

Re:Partial

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Many web pages are maldesigned shit that make doing this(without a masochistic enthusiasm for reverse-engineering) difficult; but less-broken pages can actually allow the browser to be a pretty good environment from an accessibility perspective:

For the basics, Firefox has (in Options-> Content -> Fonts & Colors -> Advanced) a fairly simple configuration menu that allows you to specify preferred fonts, font sizes, and choose whether or not your preferences are applied only to sites that don't specify anything, or whether your preferences are imposed regardless of the site's style. the 'Colors' menu allows you to do the same for text colors, background colors, and visited and unvisited link color; and also specify if they are to be used only when nothing else is specified, or forcibly applied.

If you need more granularity, I've heard good things about the 'Stylish' plugin(for FF or Chrome) that allows you to impose custom CSS on a per-site basis). Doing serious CSS demands some knowledge of what you are doing; but if you are mostly interested in 'Keep it simple and legible, dumbass', and focus on the sites you actually use most, not on trying to fix the world, any sites that aren't brutally adversarial or painfully-90s in their failure to separate content and presentation can be bludgeoned into readability.

The web situation is, arguably, worse than that of native applications that do properly respect OS scale, DPI, and theme adjustments(since each web page is effectively its own 'app', and may need to be fixed slightly differently); but markedly better than applications that fail to respect OS-provided theme and scale settings(since imposing custom CSS is child's play compared to slicing into some horrible legacy binary and trying to fix its hideous custom widget set more or less blind).

I can't read your headline!

[Anonymous Coward]

You insensitive clod! You're headline is too small for me to read!

Do you wear glasses or corrective lenses?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't have corrective lenses then I recommend going to the eye doctor and "looking" into it. You may find that all your problems can be solved with glasses.

Re:Do you wear glasses or corrective lenses?

[tehcyder]

If you don't have corrective lenses then I recommend going to the eye doctor and "looking" into it. You may find that all your problems can be solved with glasses.

Slashdot, meet Field Marshal Obvious. He's worked his way up from Captain thanks to sheer bloody hard work. It's not easy being that stupid.

Get a TV

[chrysrobyn]

A friend of mine had a similar problem, and found he couldn't get a computer monitor big enough. He ended up getting a 40" LCD TV with a HDMI input. It's on his desk at what I'd consider an uncomfortably close distance, but he swears by it.

Re:Get a TV

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said. Wish I had points to mark you up. TVs have gotten cheap.

Re:Get a TV

[FrankSchwab]

Fully agree - typing this on the 32" TV i use as a monitor.

Re:Get a TV

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't a keyboard be easier?

buy glasses.

[Lumpy]

Honestly learn how glasses are prescribed and how to modify a prescription. go to am optometrist and get a baseline made for reading then modify and order from a place that doesn't ask questions and will make dirt cheap glasses like Zenni.

I have a special set of computer glasses that are useless for seeing anything outside of my arms length but they magnify everything clearly within arms length. so I can even easily use a 11.8 inch 1080p screen at native resolution on my surface pro.

use optics to get your vision as clear as it possibly can for the monitor distance and then start toying with the software and contrast, it works a LOT better that way. and yes everyone can benefit from optics to correct as much as possible first.

Re:buy glasses.

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree 100%. I work in front of monitor for at least 10 hours a day and buying a glass with slight maginification made a world of difference in comfort. Magically my red eye syndrome also disappeared completely.

Re:buy glasses.

[pla]

Honestly learn how glasses are prescribed and how to modify a prescription.

Holy shit, loving all the fabulous advice in this thread!

Let's all assume the OP counts as a complete idiot and hasn't considered glasses or a bigger monitor, and recommend committing a fucking felony rather than addressing his question directly!

Brilliant, lads, just brilliant!

Re:buy glasses.

[BarbaraHudson]

If fundamental problems have developed with the eye, go to an ophthalmologist, not an optometrist. Huge difference. Lenses can only do so much.

Re:buy glasses.

[BarbaraHudson]

Honestly learn how glasses are prescribed and how to modify a prescription. Holy shit, loving all the fabulous advice in this thread! Let's all assume the OP counts as a complete idiot and hasn't considered glasses or a bigger monitor, and recommend committing a fucking felony rather than addressing his question directly! Brilliant, lads, just brilliant!

Got to agree with you. These posts assume the problem is one that can be fixed with a different lens, and that there is not another underlying problem, such as a form of retinopathy (retinal disease) that lenses will not be able to compensate for. To use an old camera analogy, lenses can't compensate for bad film. Or to use a car analogy, changing the wiper blades isn't going to make a cracked windshield better.

Glasses cannot fix a hole or tear in the retina, blood vessels and membranes growing on the surface of the retina, glaucoma causing damage to the optic nerve, etc. "Use a big TV as your monitor" might delay treatment of the underlying cause(s), resulting in greater damage. Been there, permanently paying the price ...

Re:buy glasses.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully he's talking about how to correctly modify the given optics numbers and then order with those numbers... not actually forge a new prescription.

Re:buy glasses.

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one hope you go blind with a little thing called "macula degeneration" so you can learn just how fucking ignorant you sound with the "have you though of glasse? Drrrrrr" response.

Are you so dense that you don't realize there are many vision problems that aren't correctible with lenses?

I have one eye, and have retinopathy and macula degeneration in the other. Fuck off with your "glasses" suggestion you piece of shit.

Re:buy glasses.

[Anonymous Coward]

Got too love the assumption that understanding optics is a "Fucking Felony" (the only "fucking felony" I know of is rape.)

Prescription glasses are not prescription drugs.

Were I to break a leg, and a Dr to prescribe using crutches using ones that weren't prescribed to me would not be a felony. adjusting the crutches to be slightly higher or lower than set by the Dr would not be a felony, but apparently focusing light slightly different is a felony now (a fucking felony none the less).

Perhaps maybe follow the OPs advice and learn something about optics before you presume that you are both an expert in optics and the law...

Re:buy glasses.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. Optical 4 Less in Hong Kong for example. Just take your regular prescription and add 2 dioptres to it. One can order five to ten pairs of glasses from them for the cost of a single pair made in Europe or America. So I have reading glasses lying around everywhere. Problem solved.

Re:buy glasses.

[pla]

Prescription glasses are not prescription drugs.

The crime here has nothing to do with the glasses, Saul, but rather, forging a prescription (and don't get cute about "correcting" it - same crime). It doesn't matter what the prescription deals with, whether drugs or glasses or dental varnish or CPAP machines.


Were I to break a leg, and a Dr to prescribe using crutches using ones that weren't prescribed to me would not be a felony.

If you altered that prescription (even though you don't actually need a prescription for crutches), then yes, you most certainly would have broken the law, however stupid you may consider that distinction.


before you presume that you are both an expert in optics and the law...

Right back at'cha. But feel free to use your "crutches" analogy when you get your day in court.

Re:buy glasses.

[david_thornley]

Probably the optometrist will be fine with writing you a prescription for glasses that will focus at your desired distance. Assuming your vision can be corrected to normal, it's an easy calculation to make it, say, a half meter: drop two diopters, if I remember correctly.

Re:buy glasses.

[pla]

Probably the optometrist will be fine with writing you a prescription for glasses that will focus at your desired distance.

If your professional reputation depended on a layman's interpretation of your advice, would you feel fine with someone altering that advice?

And on the off chance you actually said "yes", imagine that you may actually bear some legal liability for the accuracy of "your" recommendation - "Your honor, Mr. Jones died because david_thornley decided that the safety interlocks on that x-ray machine just wasted the customer's time and disabling them couldn't possibly hurt anything."


it's an easy calculation to make it, say, a half meter: drop two diopters, if I remember correctly.

Seriously, what gives with all of you trying to reduce this to a mere technical matter? "Oh, the doctor doesn't know how much this hurts, I can change that "5mg" to a "15mg", he'll probably thank me for not wasting his time in the middle of the night!". Irrelevant. You have forged a script, no matter how much better you consider your forged version.

Re:buy glasses.

[Anonymous Coward]

David_Thornley started his post with [emphasis mine]:

Probably the optometrist will be fine with writing you a prescription for glasses that will focus at your desired distance.

Your response ended with [emphasis mine]:

You have forged a script, no matter how much better you consider your forged version.

WTF is wrong with you?

- T

Re:buy glasses.

[Lumpy]

Committing a felony? are you that fucking retarded that you think such stupid shit?

Personally I am amazed that you can walk and chew gum at the same time.

Re:buy glasses.

[pla]

Well, when we humans learn to read, we learn to infer a few salient points not necessarily called out by the author. Non-autistic readers can deal with the absence of a word or two, taking the implied meaning from context.

For example, when someone mentions you learning how optics work, and then discussing how your eye doctor probably won't mind [possibly missing word here] changing a prescription, that carries the implicit idea of you, not your eye doctor, modifying the prescription. The entire discussion becomes pretty much meaningless if we reduce it to "Hey doc, can you bump this number up by a diopeter?".

But then, I don't know whether or not you, my reader, count as autistic, so feel free to interpret this in the most fucked up light imaginable.

Re:buy glasses.

[pla]

Remind me again - In what world do you live that forging a prescription doesn't break the law?

"So we consider these things dangerous/important/abusable enough to require a doctor's order to get them."
"Wait, what if someone fakes a doctor's orders to get them?"
"Oh, that would never happen!"
"Heh, of course not, what was I thinking??? Meeting adjourned!"

Re:buy glasses.

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, here's Thornley's entire two sentence post:

Probably the optometrist will be fine with writing you a prescription for glasses that will focus at your desired distance. Assuming your vision can be corrected to normal, it's an easy calculation to make it, say, a half meter: drop two diopters, if I remember correctly.

What you wrote in response to me certainly applies to the prior two posts to which you had responded, but not to Thornley's post. More likely, your zeal to continue warning us of the dangers implicit in forging an eyeglass prescription led you to misread his first sentence and therefore attribute an implication to his second sentence which clearly wasn't there. Then, when called on the obvious incongruity, you tried to assert that the implication you misconstrued was evident rather than admit a simple error. In your defense, I could have been less pithy in my first response to you, but that doesn't excuse putting words in Thornley's mouth.

Oh, and let's not ignore the lead-in with a condescending reminder about humans learning to read (that was choice), and a willingness to throw "autism" about to divert attention from your own reading comprehension error. I'll chalk it up to you having a bad day; usually your posts are more reasonable.

- T

Re:buy glasses.

[david_thornley]

I am not an optometrist. I know something about optics and human vision. After an exam once, I asked an optometrist about a prescription for computer glasses, and he dashed off one fast. (I got headaches from them, so never asked for that prescription again.) I know the sort of calculation they make. Therefore, if you're getting a prescription, you can ask for a prescription for glasses to focus at a certain distance, and the optometrist will probably just write you another prescription after doing a very simple subtraction.

I never suggested forging a prescription. Do not play games with your eyesight (although getting glasses that may or may not suit you is pretty safe). Eyes are fragile. If you have problems, rely on the professionals.

27" 5K iMac

[Anonymous Coward]

Has outstanding resolution, lots of accessibility options, and you can lower the resolution if you want to and make everything bigger. With as many pixels as this thing has, even that looks pretty good.

Re:27" 5K iMac

[Anonymous Coward]

With as many pixels as this thing has, even that looks pretty good.

What? That does not compute.

Improving web browsing colors

[GoodnaGuy]

I have an eye condition called Fuchs dystrophy which basically means my vision is slightly foggy. I mostly see things okay but when it comes to small text and certain color schemes I really struggle. For example grey text on a white background is really a strain for me to read. One thing I have found that helps with web browsing is a plugin called Stylish. This allows you to change the css file of web pages with your own. For example I read slash dot using white text on black ground with this and can do the same on many web sites. Its not perfect of course though. Some web sites cant be fixed in this way.

Re:Improving web browsing colors

[Anonymous Coward]

For example grey text on a white background is really a strain for me to read

Uh, yes that's true for everyone not just you.

Browser Extension

[Anonymous Coward]

I use a browser extension for Chrome called Dark Reader. It changes the color scheme so that the text is light against a dark background which is much easier on the eyes.

Having black text against a bright white background can cause a lot of eye strain. Dark Reader fixes this by changing the background to black and the text to an easier, lighter color to read. It's kind of like having night mode turned on, on an e-reader.

It is also free, easily manageable, can be turned off on the fly, and allows for site editing so only sites you want will be altered or not. You can also change the colors to suit your needs and make it comfortable for your eyes. There are color sliders for brightness, contrast, grayscale, and sepia.

Dark Reader also allows you to change the font to one that is more appealing to you.

Use Windows 10

[Anonymous Coward]

I will get a lot of hate for this suggestion, but mainly from coke-bottle glasses-wearing neckbeards.

I suggest you get Windows 10 (I can't bring myself to recommend it, but OSX might be alright too). The High DPI scaling of the OS has been markedly improved since 7 and even 8 (which was a step up in the first place).

I am one of the "unfortunate" to get stuck trying to make a 3k resolution my home on a 13" laptop, and although many legacy windows apps just end up crudely blowing up the bitmapped image of themselves on screen, it still works... and new programs look fantastic. It actually shifts the paradigm of fonts to where vector designs trump pixel-optimization - you will be using such large font sizes that you can't even SEE pixels.

If you have vision problems I DO NOT recommend switching to a low-dpi monitor, or a hugely bigger screen. Both of those things will serve to further worsen your eyesight.

Re:Use Windows 10

[plover]

One problem with this solution is there are still some Windows native apps that are pixel-based instead of percent or resolution based. We have a 15.6" laptop with a 3840x2160 screen, and have encountered a couple of apps that now display in impossible-to-use resolutions.

For example, QuickBooks displays a page of instructions in a tiny window that I can literally cover with my thumbnail. The minimize/restore/close icons at the upper right corner of each window are less than 1mm high, and very difficult for my wife to click on with the trackpad. Their official "fix"? Crank the resolution of the screen down to 1024x768, and learn Ctrl-F4 and Alt-F4! So because they don't know how to code, its their users' fault for buying a nice screen. If this was the only dumb-ass arrogant thing Intuit ever did, I could forgive them for not catching up to 2003 usability standards, but it's far from their first episode of "all you damn customers suck." I need a new bookkeeping package from someone who is not Intuit.

TV.

[Mal-2]

I have to second all the opinions saying "use a large TV". My only caveat would be that if you're going to sit two feet (or less) from it, you don't need the brightness all the way up. This also will reduce the heat it throws off, which can be considerable at that distance if it's CCFL-backlit LCD rather than LED -- which I actually recommend because of the better blacks. (It's still better than a similarly sized CRT though.) Also, pick something that has decent off-center performance (like an IPS panel rather than TN), so you have some freedom of movement. If you're moving your head and leaning in at times, the last thing you need is for the rest of the screen to go all wonky because you're now at the wrong angle. The closer you get, the less forgiving it's going to be.

Also, don't just use one of them if you've got the space. Use two, even if that means using the analog output on a laptop in addition to its HDMI. The more real estate you have, the less need there is to cram things into small windows. This is true even if one of them has to be much smaller than the other, in which case you may wish to have a desktop manager that will let you shuttle applications between the larger and smaller monitor easily. You can keep your primary task on the big screen and relegate the less important ones (that you still want to be able to glance at) to the smaller screen.

I personally have four monitors attached to two video cards, but this is just because that's what I happen to have. I did just fine with two. The third and fourth don't carry anything I want to read in detail, because of the pain of craning my neck all the time. They're aimed to be legible from the bed, though, so I use them as video displays. (I have four TN panels, so the aim is critical, alas.)

Re:TV.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is horrible advice - sitting close to a large TV will wreak havoc on your eyes' ability to focus, as well as their actual physical shape given enough time.

Re:TV.

[Mal-2]

That is horrible advice - sitting close to a large TV will wreak havoc on your eyes' ability to focus, as well as their actual physical shape given enough time.

Please explain how an IPS panel designed to be a television is any different from an IPS panel designed to be a monitor, when seated at the same distance from each (aside from maximum brightness, which is typically greater on a television)? This isn't the bad old days of 640x480 CRT television. I'm not advising he stick his face in the damn thing. As a matter of fact, the whole point of using a larger display at the same resolution is to make it so he doesn't HAVE to stick his face right into it to read it.

Copy Text To A Text Editor

[Anonymous Coward]

I too have that problem. Also when I resize, sometimes other text or buttons start to cover the text I'm interested in reading.

I solve this by selecting the text I want to read, and copying it to a simple text editor whose font has been adjusted to a comfortable size. If there are graphics I want to include, I copy to Libre Office.

ZoomText, Magic, SuperNova

[Anonymous Coward]

There are Screen Magnification software programs that can enlarge the entire screen. This is like the built-in Windows Magnifier on steroids. Among other options, you can change the contrast (like a film negative), change it to a specific tint (for example - no reds or yellows, only shades of blue), enlarge the mouse cursor, even read things aloud to you.

All of these have a 30 day trial. More features = more expensive.

ZoomText - www.aisquared.com - $600
Magic - http://www.freedomscientific.com/Products/LowVision/MAGic - $600
SuperNova - http://www.yourdolphin.com/productdetail.asp?id=3 - $400
iZoom - http://issist1.com/?page_id=93 - $300

Similar functionality is built-in to Mac computers without having to buy extra software.

Re:ZoomText, Magic, SuperNova

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It doesn't make Windows Magnifier any less lightweight; MS clearly included it as a checkbox feature, not to compete with the specialists; but one thing worth trying is magnifier in a dual(or more)-monitor configuration. You can move the 'magnified' window so that it fills the entire second screen; while using the primary screen as you normally would. Whatever your cursor is hovering over at a given time will be enlarged, by the amount specified in the magnifier configuration, and splashed across the second screen.

This saves you space on your primary screen; and is also a good compromise option if you find that magnification really mangles things like page layout, making navigation confusing; but you need a magnified view to read text or do other detailed work: your primary screen provides a birds-eye view of the overall layout; your magnifier screen provides a suitably enlarged view of the area around your cursor, for when you want to read a block of text. You then just look back and forth as needed.

Again, this doesn't solve the fundamental mediocrity of the magnifier tool; but given that you basically can't buy a computer without at least two video outs, and a second screen will run you 1/2 the cost of any of those programs, possibly less, it's worth at least experimenting with(at least if your vision is such that you can handle at least 'layout-level' detail; but need assistance for text, specific fiddly buttons, or other detailed elements.

Re:ZoomText, Magic, SuperNova

[DancesWithRobots]

Those prices are, in a word, obscene.

light

[Anonymous Coward]

f.lux

Have you tried NegativeScreen

[hippo]

http://arcanesanctum.net/negat...
It works with windows 7 and above and it requires Aero to provide the filtering.

I get headaches from blinding white backgrounds and after spending way too much time trying various solutions like CSS and Windows accessibility themes which don't work I found NegativeScreen.

It works by putting a filter over the whole screen and allowing you to apply a matrix transform on the pixel values. Out of the box it will reverse the colours so every window gets a black background but there are other transforms supplied (submarine mode is cool). And you can edit the config file to create your own, here's mine which adds a blue tint to the otherwise harsh black:

Blue Blacks=win+alt+F12
{ -1, 0, 0, 0, 0 }
{ 0, -1, 0, 0, 0 }
{ 0, 0, -0.85, 0, 0 }
{ 0, 0, 0, 1, 0 }
{ 1, 1, 1, 0, 1 }

ObLinux: xcalib -i

Use a projector

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have the space, use a projector and a screen on a wall. Using this arrangement daily for an hour or two seems to have 'fixed' my vision to the point where the computer screen is much easier to read. I don't know exactly why, but it works for me.

I use a 100" screen.

A Mac

[anyaristow]

Get a Mac. No matter what's on-screen, you can hold the control key and scroll (or swipe up/down on a trackpad) to zoom the whole screen. Move the mouse cursor to the edge to pan. It's intuitive, it doesn't take any screen space, it's variable zoom, and it doesn't limit magnification to a portion of the screen.

I have a nearly blind friend who ranted for years that nothing adequately replaced her Windows XP magnifier, and that a good screen reader would cost a fortune. I kept telling her to go to a Mac store and try out the magnifier and screen reader. She finally did so, bought a Mac Mini, and I haven't heard a complaint since about screen magnifiers or screen readers, and I no longer get frantic calls for support when she can't see well enough to figure out how to fix something she broke, and I'm not sure if the latter is because she's no longer breaking things or because she can see well enough to figure things out for herself.

Re:A Mac

[anyaristow]

FWIW my vision is only marginally bad (I'm far-sighted, and getting worse with age), and I have corrective glasses, and even my very modest disability is helped by such an easy zoom. I use it constantly. It's such a natural and integral part of using my Mac that I forget about it when I contemplate switching from a Mac to something else...until I use something else.

Re:A Mac

[Lord Duran]

A mac would be good, if only for the zoom ability available on Safari and Chrome (might be available on Windows too). Pinch out on the trackpad to zoom a web page (really zoom, not just change text size).

Re:A Mac

[AntEater]

That's not too surprising. I have a family member who is legally blind and finds the zoom feature in the Mac adaptive tools better than anything else available. The scaling is much smoother than the Windows mag tool.

Re:A Mac

[gurps_npc]

PC does the same thing and this is worthless. We WANT to limit the magnifcation just to one section, we don't want to do the entire screen.

When you do the entire screen, the pictures, ads, and white space (usually from columns just used at the very top) end up taking up way too much space and the 'main' text is pushed to a small fraction of the screen.

Re:A Mac

[n1hilist]

Windows also have those features built in and the ability to invert the screen but Windows has one extra, it has high contrast themes, including white on black. What put me off even considering Mac is the lack of high contrast themes as I *need* white on black text in my UI. Inverting the screen is great but not when all your photos and videos are inverted, too.

I'm not saying Windows is better, I'd love to use OSX for some needs but the lack of high contrast themes is a let down. I hope it's something they add at some point.

Re:A Mac

[rsborg]

PC does the same thing and this is worthless. We WANT to limit the magnifcation just to one section, we don't want to do the entire screen.

When you do the entire screen, the pictures, ads, and white space (usually from columns just used at the very top) end up taking up way too much space and the 'main' text is pushed to a small fraction of the screen.

You have clearly never used the Mac feature. It zooms based on mouse location, so it's targeted. It's also way smoother than on Windows (I'm not familiar past Win7, so maybe they improved things since then). I really find it handy (even with near-perfect vision) for too-small product images on say, Amazon - it's not unlike the double-tap-to-zoom feature in iOS, but smoother.

If you want just the text, all main browsers in OSX can use pinch/spread multitouch (or IIRC, CTRL+scrollwheel) to modify text size on page.

Re:A Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

Macular degeneration sufferer here (no central vision in right eye, left slightly garbled in center, slight cataracts in both, so contrast/brightness/clarity isn't the best - but I'm reasonably stable for the past 9 months now!) : I quite agree - there's nothing better than the Mac's zoom feature. I'm using it constantly and it is SO easy to scroll the mousewheel up/down to zoom/unzoom (am using the CTRL key to trigger it). Also use 'continuously with pointer' so I can slew from one side to the other smoothly and not have to hit the edge(s) of the screen to move the desktop. Am also, unfortunately, having lately to adjust the contrast for particular pages so using the function keys to step THAT up/down is a blessing.

(I won't begin to extol the virtues, and appreciation, of speech recognition and text-to-speech.)

Too bad the author limits himself to a windows machine (dude: get a Mac and run windows virtually!) and that no one has created something like 'ours' that would run as-good in windows... :\

Become a republican

[Anonymous Coward]

Your vision is still poor but you can blame it on the liberal media printing things to small.

Eye implants

[sproketboy]

I'm waiting on these so I can become a robot overlord.

http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/b...

Simple, not cheap or convenient

[DriveDog]

Best option is a much larger screen, farther away. At home, use your 40"+ TV. Get a laptop with a larger screen, but don't run it at maximum resolution. Unfortunately Windows doesn't do scaling well, so you just have to reduce the screen resolution. Easiest fix for most websites is to tell Firefox or whatever not to let the site choose background color, and choose grey yourself. Some sites don't work well with this. Tell them so and why they need to respect your background choice.

Try 16 point text in your browser

[rklrkl]

I like to use Linux Firefox with DejaVu Sans 16 point (minimum font size set to 16 as well, plus I don't allow pages to use their own fonts) and it's quite shocking how many sites break with this. Web designers don't seem to think anyone would ever use than 10 point fonts (which are ludicrously tiny on my monitor). It's annoying how Web fonts have crept into sites in recent years as well. Rather than images, they set up Web fonts for navigation icons, social media icons etc. which come out as hieroglyphics (random bitmaps almost) if you don't allow site to use Web fonts like I said I don't. Again, site designers never test their designs with Web fonts disabled, ho hum...

Special glasses

[davidwr]

I was in a school once where a kid had special "zooming" glasses that greatly magnified a small portion of the field of vision.

Since they were probably classified as "medical devices" they probably weren't cheap, but today Google Glass or something similar probably could do the job.

I do not know how well these glasses worked when pointed at a modern computer screen (or, for that matter, a CRT).

An option like this should at least be considered. If it's not terribly expensive, it should be seriously considered.

Special device

[nospam007]

The device is called 'reading glasses'. They cost a couple of bucks in the supermarket.

Re:Special device

[Anonymous Coward]

They are available at Dollar Tree for...you guessed it...$1.00. Magnifications from +0.5 to +4.0 You can also control the foreground and background colors in Firefox and Linux, and even in older versions of Windows. I don't know abou Win 7 or later, having never used them. I had vision problems that seem similar to the OP. I found that I had cataracts in both eyes. After cataract surgery, my vision is very much improved, though I have some problems because of being Diabetic. If you are not under the care of a competent eye doctor, that should be your first step. My eye doctor has made a huge improvement in my vision and therefore my life!

Typical Liberal Thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

Liberals can't see six inches in front of their noses. This is the only rational explanation for their utter lack of awareness of the real world. A conservative would simply have had a vision test, got a prescription, and purchased a nice pair of eye glasses. By doing so, he would have deferred to the state of the art in medical technology, professionals' expertise, and stimulated the economy into the bargain. The typical liberal is not aware of these simple concepts and contributes nothing to society. The purpose of a liberal is to become a drain on society, leeching off of others to provide for its every want. That's why /. gets these questions - because liberals are stupid and lazy and they hate that you know things and have free time and they want you to serve them. They hate you.

Re:Typical Liberal Thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

Conservatives are too busy looking backwards to notice anything rushing towards them.

Re:Typical Liberal Thinking

[BarbaraHudson]

Right - new glasses will somehow magically "fix" a diseased retina. Go to an ophthalmologist, not an optometrist. There are often other problems that just buying new glasses will delay addressing and end up causing even more damage. And yes, being Canadian, we're mostly so far left you'd call us pinko communists. Watching the republican candidates is good for laughs.

Go to the accessiblity options

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a magnifying glass feature on Windows, Mac and Linux. It doesn't screw up web pages when you use it.

Zoomtext

[Anonymous Coward]

My father has retinitis pigmentosa and is almost completely blind. The program that seems to work best for him is Zoomtext but is expensive.

http://www.zoomtext.com/products/zoomtext-magnifierreader/

ZoomText for the PC, or use an IPAD.

[plebeian]

One of our users who is dealing with severe visual impairment relies on a combination of zoomtext on her PC and an IPAD (the pinch to zoom function, large icons, and easy navigation make the ipad a good option). The ZoomText application is pricey but does help a lot, http://www.aisquared.com/produ...

From One Partially Sighted to Another

[TheAngryCat]

There isn't a damned thing out there that even begins to solve the issues we have. Turn your brightness down, up the contrast a little and endure it.

Bookmarklets

[Anonymous Coward]

There's plenty of bookmarklets out there to change font, font size, font color, background color, remove annoyances, open text in new tab as plain text, etc.

20/200 Sysadmin here..

[n1hilist]

This is my set of tools/techniques in Windows.

1) I use Windows 8, you now have high contrast themes and full screen magnification together (this wasn't possible on 7 below)

2) Not all, but more and more applications support the built in high contrast themes these days. When I find an application that doesn't I usually email the company/developer and politely ask them to fix it and offer to beta test any changes. Sometimes that helps.

3) I use the built in Windows magnifier combined with an Autohotkey script to give me the ability to zoom with ctrl+alt+mousewheel
3a) Here's my auothotkey script: http://pastebin.com/djAwszRA
ctrl+alt+mousewheel up/down to zoom in /out
ctrl+alt+middleclick to toggle invert colours
windowskey+F12 to hide the bloody magnifier so it doesn't get in my way when alt tabbing :)

4b) Windows 8.1 onwards has a bug where the magnifier jumps/glitches (on all GPUs, Intel, AMD, nVidia) so I've replaced magnify.exe from Win8.0's ISO)

5) I use Altdrag to give me the ability to scroll inactive Windows and resize windows via alt+mouseclicks

6) I use Palemoon (or Firefox) in High Contrast mode (it detects Windows's theme)
6a) I use this plugin to quickly flip between high contrast page rendering and normal colours https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...

I hope that helps the OP and anyone else that may have low vision. I have 20/200 in both eyes, nystagmus, suffer from migraines and many, many other eye issues but this combo, so far, is the best I've found. I'm not needing a screen reader yet, I can still play first person shooters, I mostly just have an issue with small print and cannot tolerate, at all, bright themes but dimming my monitor down does nothing as I have major issues with contrast, so it has to be white on black.

Reading glasses

[mspohr]

After reading (with my reading glasses) all of the comments here proposing complicated and expensive monitor and software solutions, I would like to suggest that you just get a pair of reading glasses. The are designed to magnify things at close distance. You should adjust the distance to your monitor to about 18" which is the focal length of most reading glasses.
Reading glasses are cheap and come in magnifications of 1.5 to 2.75.

f.lux

[TastelessGarbage]

F.lux cools the display at night (less blue) and is fully customizable. I have been using it for a few weeks - free, and well worth a try.

Exactly

[twmcneil]

This is exactly what I did a few years ago. "Reading" glasses set for a focal length of about 25 inches. Mine use a full size lense, not the little half height ones typically found in reading glasses. While you are at it, get the glare reducing coating and non-reflective frames. Eyeglasses like these will allow you to see the whole screen without moving your head around to find the right focal point.

I use regular progressive bifocals for everything but computer work. If you try to use typical reading glasses from the dollar store for computer work, you will be tilting your head in a very awkward angle in focus the screen. Same thing for progressives or the old fashioned bifocals.

Re:Use a larger monitor. (Glasses Suggestion)

[Anonymous Coward]

When I worked as an optical lab tech we used to make screen reading glasses. In bifocals usually what you do is take the reading add (say +2.50) and half it for a computer screen (so +1.25) but these also take into account the primary prescription. Reading glasses only have the add so you either need to wear them over your regular glasses (there are clip-ons) or you need to add this to your primary prescription. So if you are near sighted or far sighted you take the primary (say +1.25 or -2.25) and add half the reading add (say +1.25) and you get the prescription you need (so +2.50 or -1.00). This makes it easier for near sighted to find over-the-counter screen glasses but you might find some with a light far sighted prescription or with a custom prescription pair from a cheap glasses manufacturer (think a $20-$50 pair found online) or a regular priced pair if you have $200+ to blow or get in on a buy one get one sale.

That all said these only help with light to moderate prescriptions. People with very bad vision (anything over +/- 7.00'ish) will probably have a hard time with just glasses.

Readability Extension for Chrome

[maxbuzz]

I've been using Readability Extension for Chrome.
https://chrome.google.com/webs...
Firefox has Reader-View button in the address bar.

Re:Readability Extension for Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using Readability Extension for Chrome.

https://chrome.google.com/webs...

Firefox has Reader-View button in the address bar.

This is indeed a great product, especially for longer article when the page layout doesn't scale with the textsize and we end up with 4 words per line.

WAI_ARIA

[Anonymous Coward]

Put on a blindfold and you can still use a screen reader. I've built plenty of applications that a blind person can use.

The answer is to build WAI-ARIA-compliant applications. Here are some pieces of advice:

1. Do not use pixels to hard-code your sizes. Use Ems to make sizes relative in order to properly zoom the application.
2. Before you start writing CSS make sure your color scheme is compliant (http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/)
3. Do not use color as a sole indicator. If 'new' items are Red and 'updated' items are Green then a color-blind user cannot tell the difference. It may be helpful to non-color-blind users to see this information but there should also be an additional indicator that does not require the ability to see color.

Get laser surgery...

[__aaclcg7560]

My late father had to get laser surgery for his eyes since Costco and/or Wal-Mart no longer carried the thick bottle glass glasses he had since the 1950's. That corrected his far sight vision. Still needed reading glasses that he bought from the drug store.

Magnifier, screen resolution

[alasdair]

Assumes you have Windows 8 or later, which greatly improved the built-in accessibility features.

COLOUR

Turn on Windows Magnifier. Set it to 100% - that is, no magnification. But in Settings, check on "Turn on colour inversion". Your screen is now mainly white-on-black and less glaring.

Option: Instead, select one of the High Contrast themes. Not all applications will respect this, however (Chrome offers you a High Contrast extension, for example).

TEXT SIZE - GLOBAL

Reduce your screen resolution (not the text scaling, the actual number of pixels horizontally and vertically). This works fine in every application, where changing the text scaling doesn't work across every application. It's the simple fix I employ most often.

Option: also check out the Display > Change the text size only options, which give you bigger title bars and suchlike.

TEXT SIZE - PER APPLICATION

Yeah, this is the tricky one. You don't want to have to scroll left and right: as you say, "make things fit inside the screen".

Microsoft Office - zoom controls, bottom right of each application, combined with "Draft" or "Read" modes in recent versions to give you more text and less pretty whitespace on the screen.

Browsers - check for "Readability" functions, either built in or as extensions: page loads, you click on them, text all fills the screen, flowing and readable and sizable without left-right scrolling. "Reader View" is the one in Firefox, icon in the address box. "Reading View" in Edge, same effect. The Readability extension in Chrome.

Option: try using the mobile versions of websites, like mobile.facebook.com, which have simpler layouts assuming less horizontal space and therefore zoom better.

PDF - Adobe Reader - F4 to make PDFs reflow, normal zoom controls then zoom text without left/right scrolling.

NEXT STEPS

Your vision may degrade further as you age. Check out NVDA (open-source free screenreader) and WindowEyes (commercial but available for free for anyone with a copy of Microsoft Office).

I work in assistive technology and have developed the open-source WebbIE software for fourteen years for blind screenreader users: http://www.webbie.org.uk/

Tools for Vision Independece

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look at our Website. There are lots of specific solutions for Low Vision individuals to make better use of their computers.
www.thelowvisionstore.net. Please excuse the silly posting name. I am not at all familiar with this arena and have contributed because a client asked me to.

Some of my experience

[MakNL]

My assumption is that you are already familiar with eyeglasses (if not, read the other posts) and also familiar with ctrl +. My first advise to improve contrast is to get light characters on a black background. The windows magnifier, starting from windows 7, allows you to invert the colors (use buttons ctrl-alt-i to invert the colors). Select the full screen mode. Unfortunatly this only available on the Aero schemes on windows 7, and not the high contrast schemes. From windows 8 on, high contrasts theme is possible in combination with the magnifying glass. My advise is NOT to use black background high contrast theme. In theory it is a good idea, but there always remain some application that support it partially or not at all. Other applications need al lot of configurations to get the colors right. Web pages don't support it all, they choose their own colors. In my opinion, the high contrast theme with the white background in combination with an inversion of the colors with the magnifying glass works best. What I see as an advantage of this theme is that internet explorer (and also firefox I believe) sees that a high contrast theme has been selected and overrides the colors of the webpages (no longer grey text on white background). Chrome doesn't. That may be an advantages in situations when you really need the colors. Ofcourse the windows magnifier can also be used the magnify the screen with windows +. The steps can be made smaller than the default +100% by using the slide bar in the settings panel. I don't know any program that changes the view of the programs that really changes the view of programs. Expect some reader modes inside programs. The next options may be not be suited for you, but I wish the share some more knowledge. A problem with large magnifications is that it is difficult to orientate yourself or the view. In particular if you switch between programs, or screens. This is one of the shortcomings of the free magnify programs. There are specialized programs that helps you with these shortcomings. For example if you start word, you start with the cursor on the right spot. If you go to the menu with a keyboard shortcut, the screen moves to the right spot. However I believe you need to arrange some support and training to find out the best way of working with these programs. Try to get in thouch with users of such programs before buying these programs. In some countries there are paramedicsupport organisations that can help you. Because you mention that you read text a lot, it might be an option to use screen readers. Programs that read text aloud. It make take extra time to listen to a document. But perhaps you understand a document better after hearing. And it may save you energy.

LED TV

[Anonymous Coward]

LED TV's tend to have a much better viewing angle which helps substantially with working that close to the monitor.

Technical and Medical

[angel'o'sphere]

Technical, consider a Mac. I'm sure you can borrow one and get help to get accustomed with its visibel impaired modes.
Medical, consider a lens implant/artificial lens.

ZoomText but it's $$$

[accessbob]

There are some very good and intelligent screen magnifiers out there, but they do cost.

ZoomText is by far the most functional, but you will pay anything between $50 and $1,000 depending on the version.

Re:Use a larger monitor. (Glasses Suggestion)

[hackwrench]

I asked my optometrist to recheck my near vision and she said something about it changing with age and that it isn't magic. I had to think about this and after I had long left realized that it not being magic would mean to me that it is caused by a wide variety of factors and because of that needs to be tested. I had recently moved so I was going to a new optometrist, and she seemed very surprised that I even needed multifocal lenses, which I have needed for quite a few years now, at my age of 38. I don't know what lens maker she uses, but in the initial attempt one lens was quite a bit off.

Re:GET GLASSES

[hackwrench]

I have glasses. They don't work nearly as well as they should, you insensitive clod.

Built in Scaling + Flux

[Anonymous Coward]

DPI scaling to make things bigger, f.lux to stop programs and websites from searing your retinas.

Mac has very good accessibility especially zoom

[Anonymous Coward]

Mac has very good accessibility especially zoom.

I had to ditch Windows and buy a Mac.

Zoom on the Mac is seamless and way better than Windows Magnifier.

Text to speech is integrated and works well.

F.Lux handles the bright screens.

I can still run Windows in a virtual machine then use the Mac zoom feature on the virtual machine.

Slashdot is awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

I resize text in Firefox on my 46" 2560x1080 monitor so I can rest my glasses and Slashdot is awesome for that. If only every site handled resizing and the reflow of text like Slashdot! You are a fine example for all!

Get a Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple has system wide settings to seal with all of the issues mentioned and has for a very long time

Book-Reading glasses vs. Computer-Reading glasses

[billstewart]

Computers are typically at 22-24" focal distance, compared to book-reading glasses, which have a focal distance shorter than that (I forget it it's 18" or what.) This means telling the eye doctor when I get an exam that I want to know the pupillary distance for the computer reading glasses. (Sometimes this requires a "yes, really" discussion, in addition to the "oh, you're ordering glasses online" one, but that lets me get multiple $20 computer glasses of the current prescription so there's one set at the office and one at the home computer.)

NeWS PostScript-based Window System :-)

[billstewart]

Back in the late 80s / early 90s, we were using Sun computers, with either NeWS or OpenLook. My manager had a 21" monitor, but even so was getting tired of switching between one set of glasses to read it and another set to talk to people, and printing out email to read it. So we just told his machine to use 24-point bold font as his default, and he could read it just fine. (Your operating system probably isn't as flexible, though maybe if you've got a Mac it'll do :-)

Hypra

[LienRag]

Hypra.fr

Tibetan Eye Chart

[Anonymous Coward]

After working on the computer for 25+ years, dealing with all types of screen sizes, reading tiny text for hours, days, weeks.. things started to get "fuzzy" and, suddenly I found myself always squinting or doing just what you're asking, looking for helper programs to increase text size (band-aids) to what was actually a more fundamental problem that was easier to solve than I ever thought.

While on vacation I met a man in his 80's who had worn glasses for 40 years but had gotten rid of them in just under a month's time. He was trying to convince a friend of mine that he too could stop wearing glasses and that indeed anyone with poor eyesight of any kind could improve their vision dramatically with a few simple exercises in just a few weeks and a few minutes (about 9 min.) a day.

Our habits eventually train our eye muscles to act in very confining ways over time which results in poor eye sight because they don't get the full range of muscle use that would be normal, so these other muscles become weaker and unable to do their job efficiently.

Here's a link to the chart and instructions I used to fix my own vision in about 2-3 weeks (i still do the exercises twice a week):

http://www.energybalancing.com/Downloads/Tibetan%20Eye%20Chart.pdf