One of the side effects of the rather large doses of steroids I’m on for my myeloma is that they can affect my vision. I often find my sight feels like I am stuck in a heavy mist. Not all the time; it comes and goes day-by-day. It doesn’t seem as though my sight has become more blurred; it is more like a soft focus filter over a camera lens. But I certainly wouldn’t trust my eyesight to drive today!

Daytime is the worst. There is more contrast once the sun has gone down and I’m using the artificial lighting in the house, but that might be because it is not as bright as the natural light in the very sunny upstairs room I normally spend my time in.

I have done a lot of web development in the past, and I always promoted the need for accessibility on sites. This used to get me into the odd disagreement with designers who prefer pretty over ease of use, clients, and an old boss who also liked to jam as much into designs as possible, regardless of how accessible they were.

I thought I was pretty switched on with this, but I now have a new appreciation of just how difficult it can be to use various devices when you have some form of visual impairment. My iPhone has a reasonable range of settings for bumping up text size on some apps, but not all. Sadly, one that I use a lot — the web app for Friendica — does not respond to increasing text size settings.

(Insert: I’ve actually discovered I can make the text bigger in the Friendica web app by changing the Safari settings. This is much better.)

Fortunately, I can increase text sizes in the Vivaldi browser on my laptop and iPhone, which is a reasonable compromise. Increasing it to 140%–150% seems ideal. It just goes to show that there is nothing like real-world experience in accessibility to improve web design.