Redesigning my information technology usage because my eyeballs betray me

Greetings from a hot northeastern Virginia.  It’s not excessive today, with the temperature standing around 90° F/33° C, and quite dry.  I just did some weeding before hitting the gym and imagined the yanked-out plants withering in the sun.  Hydration is the order of the day.

Sometimes on this blog I share personal stories and reflections.  Today I’ll offer another one having to do with information, technology, the body, and time.  I’m starting to rethink how I use digital technology, again.  This time it’s because of changes in my face.  Specifically, my eyeballs are making things… difficult.  It might be a small or minor thing in the end, but the details grow in my examination, and the possibilities might be of interest.

To explain with a bit of personal history: for the first 50 years of my life I enjoyed superb eyesight.  Tests reliably showed 50-50 vision (20-20 in Britain). Years and years of intensive and extensive reading didn’t stress my eyes – which was strange.  Everyone in my family wore glasses except me.  It was weird but nice.

My schooling and career involved extreme amounts of eyestrain due to extensive amounts of reading: for a literature PhD, grading student writing, and escalating amounts of screen content.  The eyeballs held up just fine through all of that.

…until a few years ago, when I grudgingly noticed small font blurring. I realized I was squinting to read some product labels and books with tiny print.  After enduring enough of this I bought my first cheap reader, or glasses designed to help people read close up, from a drugstore, and using thing thing was a marvelous improvement.  Fuzzy print leaped into the clarity I remembered of old.  So I bought several different readers and stashed them in the places where I’d most likely need them: my office, my laptop bag (I travel a lot for work), my bedside (I always read before sleep), and the kitchen (for recipes, labels, print cookbooks).

One thing hasn’t worked well. I tried to get used to carrying glasses with me, besides stashing them in my laptop bag, but have often failed so far. I even bought a pair that hangs around my neck and magnetically clips together, which doesn’t involve carrying them in a pocket, which is handy, but they tended to snap closed on my beard so I keep sort of deliberately forgetting them.  Instead, and pathetically, I end up using my phone’s magnifying glass app when I need to, say, read a print menu in a restaurant or scrutinize a food label in a grocery store.

Meanwhile, my medium and far vision has been fine.  I have no issues with driving, reading street signs, identifying buildings, scanning the horizon for kaiju, etc.  So there’s been no need for bifocals or progessives.

Alas, recently things seem to be worsening again. I turned 57 this year and now am noticing that some screen content on some devices is blurry.  Some, not all: my desktop computer (a Mac Mini) produces easily readable stuff on a big screen, but sometimes laptop text is hard to read.  My Kindle hardware e-reader is lovely, once I embiggen the font, but I’m finding I have to squint at some of my phone (a new Galaxy Fold 5). When I get to play Xbox, I usually sit, as one does, but increasingly stand to get closer to the screen to read small print in dialog boxes.  Subtitles on a big screen are fine, but worryingly dim on small screens.

This is frustrating and worrying, yet also fascinating.  The word is presbyopia.

It’s a new term for me.  Apparently over time the eyeball and related muscles gradually lose elasticity, decreasing focus.  The Mayo Clinic helpfully describes it as “a natural, often annoying part of aging.”  (Another friend wrote “welcome to your next stage of adulthood”) I’m reminded of how ancient glass slowly, so slowly, starts to flow downwards in the direction of gravity.  I’m seeing through those leaking panes now.

What can one do in this situation?

To start, I tinker with the technologies.  Some devices and some applications give me wide latitude for font sizes, which makes a great difference.  The Kindle is splendid for this.  Others do not, or make those changes hard to find.  On the phone I can make some pdfs enormous but not Duolingo’s texts.  Thankfully the Fold has a nearly tablet-sized mode, which some apps sprawl across. On my laptops I can hit command or control plus on web pages, which is great for text and some script-created images, but system dialog boxes are frustratingly immoveable.  A good amount of text appears not as text, but as part of image files (like the 18th century drawing above), and those I need to either download to my desktop to manipulate in an image viewer, or get a screen shot for same… and sometimes those just end up blurry.  Some computer games have font options we can adjust, while others do not.

I can also try altering default fonts in systems.  An old friend recommended the Atkinson Hyperlegible Font, which I’ve downloaded and (I think) installed on at least one machine.  I think this will make it easier to read some text.

Then there’s supplemental technology – i.e., glasses. I can’t remember when I first crammed glasses on my face to stare at a phone, or what the stimulus was, but I do remember the sweet rush of clarity which resulted, as well as the awkward way it felt, like peering through a window to see through another window. Now I’ve taken to pushing my readers on when using the laptop more and more often.  It still feels strange, an admission of failure somewhere.

Naturally, I asked people about this idea, in person and online, as is my usual open practice. Some folks confessed to using glasses on their machines as well, always citing their aging bodies.  Often it’s the close-up hardware that requires glasses: phones, tablets, laptops.  Some have said that devices positioned a little farther away – a desktop monitor one or two feet from one’s face, an airport flights display standing off a yard or so – doesn’t require eyewear. It’s good to know others are in the same position.

Several folks have recommended blue light readers, which reduce some of the input from computer screens.  I haven’t tried this yet.

I still need to get use to hauling readers with me everywhere, and I haven’t got the habit down yet.  Maybe I need to attach them to something which I’m habituated to carrying, like phone or watch.  Perhaps I should make a glasses case which will delight me and some others, either repurposing and revamping a preexisting one or building one from scratch.  I’d like to add some of my style, perhaps some Gothic, metal, or steampunk themes.

Professionally, I’m a futurist.  I have to look ahead at possibilities.  Applying this lens (ahem) to myself, I assuming eyeball relaxation will continue and vision will keep degrading.  I’m also assuming I’ll keep reading a lot, both on screens and elsewhere. Based on that:

• A simple fix is to get used to always having glasses on my face.  Bifocals might be in my future, so I can quickly flip between close-up and the rest of the world.  I’ve also heard good things about progressives, but never tried them.
• I’ve never managed to fit a contact lens into one of my eyeballs.  Maybe I should try this as an option.
• Perhaps the Meta Ray-bans will be a good step.  I’ve long been fascinated by the possibilities of combining augmented with virtual reality, and this will be a useful experiment.  I don’t know if I can get them with readers, though.
• Changing my hardware environment.  The Fold opens nicely, but maybe I’ll need an even bigger screen in a few years.  Should I expect to shift to a full tablet then, or will glasses have evolved enough to take up a phone’s functions?
• Doing more with audio.  I can shift some close-up visual experiences to digital audio. I’m already a podcast fiend and do like audiobooks; I can do more of that.
• Looking further ahead, I can imagine losing my near vision entirely, perhaps in a decade or two, assuming I live that long. I don’t know if my medium- and long-range vision will fail as well. Maybe the thing to do now is start preparing myself for at least partial blindness, and lean hard into accessibility technologies.
• I don’t know what the medical options are at this point, nor have I looked into (har har) possibilities for the next decade.   Surgeries? Implants?  Time to research.

That’s where I’ll stop now, having delved too deeply into matters opthamological.  I’d love to hear any suggestions or stories from people with more personal and/or professional eyeball experience.

(thanks to all kinds of friends on Mastodon and Facebook, not to mention my patient family)