Even if you can read this, chances are you know somebody who can't. More than 16 million Americans report some form of visual impairment even when wearing glasses or contacts. That number is expected to double by 2030 as the aging population brings rising rates of macular degeneration, glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy and other eye diseases.
But "low vision" (technically, worse than 20/60 in the better eye) doesn't have to mean darkness and dependence. An ever-growing array of devices can help people maximize their remaining vision and in many cases, compensate for what they've lost. Some of the new offerings: free software that can tailor the text on any Web site to your personal visual needs, and a cellphone that can snap photos of text -- like signs and restaurant menus -- and read it back to you.
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1 comment:
It is a good piece. Please let me play leapfrog on this with my search for easy to read online news sources for the partially sighted.
Journalism's migration from paper to the Internet has carried over old habits of format that are unsuitable to the computer screen, making some online newspapers confusing and hard to read. Some do it better than others. The NYTimes and Reuters do well by providing the headlines with links to the articles. It is a matter of "scroll down" vs. "down up across down up across down up across, etc."
I am not talking about mousing; I am talking about eye movement. It is easier for me and more effective to keep my eyes on a small part of the screen and have the news scroll to it than have my eyes search the screen for things that interest me. It is like the old joke punch line: "You tell that dog to come 'round to where my eyes is restin'".
The NYTimes does it my way by every morning emailing me the headlines with a short paragraph for each, sorted by category (Nat'l, Business, Arts, etc). When I click in a headline it takes me to the story.. Not perfect, because they select only what they think are the top stories, but they do very well and it is better than fumbling around in a make believe paper. They put it all in one column with ads on the right. That makes easy to read by just scrolling down.
Questions: (1) Who else is doing this? and (2) Is there a public message board devoted to Low Vision?
===gm=== gfmueden@verizon.net
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