**Dry Macular Degeneration Causing Excessive Sensitivity** -- In
contrast to my brother, who requires bright displays to see his
work, I have a friend who is very sensitive to the brightness and
contrast of LCD screens due to suffering from the early stages of
dry macular degeneration. When he views a monitor straight on, he
describes looking up at it “through his eyebrows” — meaning that he
uses his eyelids to cover the pupil partially in order to create a
pinhole-view effect. He blocks out much of the screen, focuses on
just a line or two of text, and then looks down again.
<
https://www.macular.org/dry-amd>
His solution to the excessive brightness is to dim his screens with
the free utility Shades, which competently manages multiple
monitors. He also views monitors from above, which throws less light
into his eyes. Nevertheless, he still experiences some artifacting,
which can be distracting, particularly with a Twitter or mail client
that has subtle background colors to indicate message status, Web
page text with blue links that seem to cast a yellow haze around
everything else on the page, and light text on a dark background
that produces ghosted images of lines.
<
http://www.charcoaldesign.co.uk/shades>
With regard to vision, my friend talks about making hard choices:
not just with what he’s going to do, but with what he pays attention
to — and even when he opens his eyes and for how long. “You have to
_choose_ what you’re going to look at,” he says.
**Living in a Colorless World** -- Another acquaintance, a former
software engineer whom I’ll call “Roy” (with a background in, of all
things, information visualization and graphical display of complex
data), is severely colorblind due to a rare eye disease called
_incomplete achromatopsia_, or _dyschromatopsia_. In dim-to-medium
indoor lighting, he sees only in grayscale. With increasing
illumination, he can discern colors from the red to the blue end of
the color spectrum. But as illumination increases, details become
harder to see. He can’t discern washed-out or pastel colors under
any conditions, and he claims that he “fails every standard test of
color vision miserably.”
<
https://www.achromatopsia.info/>
Roy has poor visual acuity — he is legally blind in typical
illumination conditions — even with his prescription eyeglasses. In
addition, he suffers extreme sensitivity to light, which renders him
nearly blind in sunlight if he’s not wearing specialty dark glasses
with side shields. He also wears a hat or visor to block stray light
from above. All of these symptoms and experiences are typical of
incomplete achromatopsia.
(AchromaCorp is currently the only organization that specifically
raises funds to develop treatments and cures for achromatopsia. For
the cautiously optimistic, medical research group AGTC may begin
conducting human trials within two years for a workable gene therapy
to treat achromatopsia and other eye diseases.)
<
http://achromacorp.org/>
<
http://www.agtc.com/>
With regard to computer use, like many low-vision users, Roy makes
do with what he has. His primary operating system is Windows XP. He
sets the style to Windows Classic, because the blue-and-green Luna
visual style is “too visually cluttered and confusing.”
The bane of many a Windows user’s experience is Microsoft Outlook,
and that’s no different for Roy, especially after Microsoft changed
one of its key design features of Outlook. In previous versions,
unread email appeared bolded. The color scheme now distinguishes
read from unread mail with what appears to him to be “slightly
different shades of gray, and in the same font, size, and boldness,”
making it far more difficult for him to differentiate between types
of messages.
Similarly, with the Outlook calendar, the color that distinguishes
the Today box is almost the same brightness as the color of the
appointment rectangles, which makes them difficult to distinguish
for those suffering from color blindness.
Roy observes an increasing use of color coding to convey information
that had formerly been conveyed via simple text or other graphical
conventions. His coping strategy is to spend more time trying to
discern what are to him the subtle differences in visual cues.
One positive recent trend in graphic design, however, is the
“flattening” of icons, buttons, and other elements — a look-and-feel
change that’s pronounced in iOS 8 and OS X 10.10 Yosemite — because
it allows more of the screen real estate to be used for clearer
images and larger text rather than for nonfunctional elements, such
as 3D border shading or color gradations.
<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_UI_Design>
When viewing Web sites Roy simply enlarges the browser text as
needed. Some Web sites, however, choose color schemes that render
sites inaccessible for colorblind users. (Terrible palettes include
blue text on a green background, yellow text on a blue background,
red text on a black background, and any text on a busily patterned
background.) If Roy needs to read such a Web site, he must highlight
the text to do so.
Because of his light sensitivity, Roy reduces the backlight
brightness to the lowest setting, but sets the contrast high. This
is a paradox, though, because higher contrast also increases
brightness, so it’s a compromise. He also sets the screen to a low
resolution of 1024 by 768, which enlarges text to make it readable
for him.
Roy doesn’t have a particular font preference, but text size is
important. For composition, he sets the font size to around 20-point
type (Arial), which is on the low end of ease of use for him. For
reading long documents, such as ebooks, he sets the font size to
approximately 36-point type or more.
When I first discussed this topic with him, Roy summed up the
problematic recent design trends thus: “Computing is getting harder
for people like me because users are expected to do ever more with
ever smaller screens.”
Avoiding small screens altogether is becoming less of an option.
These devices — which rely on minuscule font sizes; small, highly
detailed icons, color coding; and visual clutter — are increasingly
displacing traditional, more accessible media (print maps, business
cards, landline phones), leaving those with poor visual acuity at a
disadvantage. Even apps that enable zooming and scrolling are clumsy
and time-consuming.
“These products aren’t designed by or for elders or for those with
any kind of visual impairment, such as color defects or ambient
light interference,” he laments. As a result, he doesn’t own a
mobile phone.
Also, disabled people suffer much higher rates of crime
victimization than the able-bodied (and the able-visioned). Roy
feels particularly vulnerable to street crime because of his low
vision and the dark glasses that block his peripheral vision. The
proliferation of expensive mobile devices has exacerbated theft and
related crimes in high-density areas, disproportionately harming
people with low vision and other disabilities.
<
http://www.disabled-world.com/disability/statistics/disabilities-crime.php>
**Preparing for Visual Impairment** -- I figured that there must be
some help for people like me, and there is, to some extent. In
hindsight, of course, the best time to have learned about such
options was _before_ I found myself disabled.
Preparing for the loss of vision is like disaster preparedness; most
people don’t want to think about it. You hope that you’re never in
such a situation, but if you are, you’re glad that you did at least
some preliminary work to prepare. Familiarity with Accessibility
preferences and third-party utilities is akin to installing quality,
regularly inspected fire extinguishers and smoke detectors around
your home.
While coping with my own affliction, I was inspired to learn more
about other people’s experiences with visual impairment as well as
about remedies and assistive technologies for people like us. In the
next installment of this series, I’ll explore a variety of eye
problems and share the advice of vision care experts.
----
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