Greetings from hot Northeast Virginia. Not too hot today, 90 degrees Fahrenheit/33 degrees Celsius, and pretty dry. I just did some weeding before going to the gym, and I can’t help but imagine the plants I pulled withering in the sun. Staying hydrated is a challenge today.
In this blog, I occasionally share personal stories and reflections. Today, I want to tell another story about information, technology, the body, and time. I am starting to rethink how I use digital technology again, this time because of changes in my face. Specifically, my eyeballs are making things… difficult. It may seem small, trivial in the end, but as I explore it, details emerge and the possibilities may become intriguing.
A bit of personal history – I was blessed with excellent eyesight for the first 50 years of my life. Tests showed I had reliably 50/50 vision (20/20 in the UK). I was able to concentrate and read a lot for years without straining my eyes. It was strange – everyone else in my family wore glasses. It was strange but good.
My school life and work were accompanied by extreme eye strain due to the massive amounts of reading I was doing for my PhD, grading student writing, and ever-increasing amounts of screen content. But through it all, my eyeballs held up just fine.
…Until a few years ago, I noticed that small print was becoming blurry. I found myself squinting to read small labels and books. After I had enough of this, I bought my first cheap eye-reader (a pair of glasses designed to help you read things up close) at the drugstore and was amazed at the improvement. My blurry print returned to its former clarity. So I bought a few eye-readers and hid them in the places I thought I’d need them most: in my office, in my laptop bag (I travel a lot for work), by my bedside (I always read before bed), in my kitchen (for recipes, labels, and printed cookbooks).
One thing that hasn’t worked: I’ve tried many times to get into the habit of carrying my glasses with me, other than stashing them in my laptop bag, but have failed. I’ve also bought a pair of glasses that hang from my neck with a magnet. They’re convenient because I don’t have to carry them in my pocket, but they tend to get caught in my beard and close, so I often forget to put them on purpose. Instead, when I need to read a printed menu at a restaurant or scrutinize a food label at the grocery store, I turn to the magnifying glass app on my phone.
Meanwhile, my intermediate and distance vision is excellent — I have no problems driving, reading road signs, identifying buildings, scanning the horizon for monsters, etc. — so I’ve never needed bifocals or progressive lenses.
Unfortunately, things seem to have gotten worse again recently. I turned 57 this year and I’ve noticed that the screen content on some devices is blurry. Not all, but some. My desktop computer (Mac Mini) produces easily readable content on the large screen, but text on my laptop can be hard to read. My Kindle hardware e-reader is great at making fonts larger, but I’ve noticed that some parts of my phone (the new Galaxy Fold 5) require me to squint. When I play Xbox, I usually sit down, but I find myself standing up more and more to get closer to the screen to read the tiny text on the dialogue boxes. Subtitles are fine on the large screen, but worryingly dim on the small screen.
This is frustrating, worrying, and intriguing all at the same time. The word is presbyopia.
A new term for me. Apparently, over time, our eyeballs and associated muscles slowly lose elasticity and focus, a process the Mayo Clinic describes as “a natural, but often annoying, part of aging.” (Another friend wrote, “Welcome to the next stage of adulthood.”) It reminds me of ancient glass slowly, very slowly, sliding down in the direction of gravity. Right now, I’m looking through leaky glass.
What can be done in this situation?
First, play around with the technology. Some devices and applications give you a lot of freedom with font size, which makes a big difference. The Kindle excels in this respect; others don’t, or the changes are harder to spot. On the phone, some PDFs can be made gigantic, but Duolingo texts are not. Thankfully, the Fold has a mode that’s closer to tablet size, and some apps will stretch to that size. On a laptop, you can press Command or Control + on a web page. This is great for text and scripted images, but system dialog boxes are frustratingly immovable. A significant amount of text appears as part of an image file, not as text (such as the 18th century painting above). These texts have to be downloaded to the desktop and manipulated in an image viewer, or screenshotted, but they can be blurry. Some computer games let you adjust font options, others don’t.
You could also try changing the default font on your system. An old friend recommended the Atkinson Hyperlegible Font to me, so I downloaded it and installed it on at least one machine (I think). I think it makes some text easier to read.
Then there’s assistive technology: glasses. I don’t remember the first time I shoved them against my face to stare at my phone, or what the stimulus was, but I do remember the resulting rush of pleasurable clarity and the awkward sensation of peering through a window into another. Now, when I use my laptop, I try to encourage readers to do so more often. There’s still that weird feeling of admitting failure somewhere.
Naturally, I asked people about this idea openly, as I always do, both in person and online. Several people confessed that they wear glasses for machines because of their aging build. They often need glasses for nearby hardware, like phones, tablets, and laptops. Others said they don’t need glasses for devices that are a little further away, like a desktop monitor a foot or two away from their face, or an airport flight display a yard or so away. It was comforting to know that others are in the same boat.
Some people have recommended blue light readers that reduce some of the input from computer screens, I have not tried these yet.
I’m not used to carrying a reading device everywhere I go yet, and it hasn’t become a habit for me. Maybe I should attach a reading device to something I’m used to carrying around, like my phone or watch. Maybe I should create a glasses case that will please me and others, either by reusing and improving an existing one or making one from scratch. I’d like to add a bit of my own style, like a theme like gothic, metal, or steampunk.
I’m a futurist by trade. I have to look ahead to possibilities. Applying this lens to myself (ahem), I’m assuming that our eyeballs will continue to relax and that our eyesight will continue to deteriorate. I’m also assuming that we’ll continue to do a lot of reading, not just on screens but elsewhere as well. Based on that:
The easy solution is to get used to wearing glasses all the time. Maybe in the future I’ll be able to get bifocals. That way I can switch between close and outside worlds quickly. I’ve heard good things about progressive lenses too, but I’ve never tried them. I’ve never been able to put contact lenses in one eyeball. Maybe I should try that as an option. Meta Ray-bans might be a good step. I’ve long been fascinated by the possibility of combining augmented and virtual reality, so this would be a useful experiment. I’m not sure I’ll be able to achieve that with the Reader, though. Changing the hardware environment. The Fold opens well, but I might need an even bigger screen in a few years. Should I expect to move to a full tablet then, or will the glasses have evolved enough to take over the functions of a phone? Getting more out of audio. I could move some of my close-view visual experience to digital audio. I’m already a podcast fanatic, and I also like audiobooks. I could get more out of it. Looking further ahead, I can imagine losing my near vision completely in maybe 10 or 20 years. That’s assuming I live that long. I’m not sure if I’ll lose my mid-range and distance vision too. Maybe the thing to do now is to prepare for at least partial blindness and focus on accessible technology. I don’t know what my medical options are at this point, and I haven’t looked into the possibilities for the next decade (lol). Surgery? Implants? Time to research.
I’ve delved too deeply into ophthalmology matters so I’ll stop here, I’d love to hear suggestions and stories from anyone with more personal or professional experience in ophthalmology.
(Thanks to all my friends on Mastodon and Facebook, and to my patient family)
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