Writing with a visual impairment

So, a new thing has happened to me this year. I’m diabetic, long term, diagnosed over thirty years ago. One of the many fun complications from that is the impact on the organs of your body, especially if you go through a period of poor diabetic discipline ( easier than you would believe - living with diabetes is mentally exhausting and it changes your fundamental relationship with the world).

Eyesight is particularly vulnerable to diabetic change, and, a few years ago, I had a bleed in my left eye which caused some scarring and shifted the shape of my retina to the point where the vision in that eye is always going to be fuzzy.

It’s not a great thing to happen, but I still had one fully working eye, and my control is excellent these days thanks to some of the developments in diabetic treatments since I was first diagnosed. That changed earlier this year. I had a bleed again, this time in the right eye. The impact has been a bit different, however. Now, I can’t deal with glare. Black text on a white background is unreadable because the text just washes away in the white.

You would think that this would be an easy thing to deal with when using a modern computer of any description; switch to dark mode and you’re sorted. If only it was that simple. The thing I’ve found since this became a problem for me is that the interfaces for the software I use on a daily basis both for writing and work are wildly inconsistent.

Word, for example ( I know, I should be using better tools, but it’s what I have) will happily let me write white text on a black page which is perfectly readable, but as soon as I invoke a dialog box of any kind, like the Find function or to change a font, glaring white and black text. I’m mentioning Word, because it’s what I use most, but it’s far from the only culprit. Web sites that ignore dark mode because the designer thinks it’s more important to honour their own colour scheme than make the content available to a wider audience, same with documents that rely on presenting information graphically without asking if every person who needs to access it will be able to use that graphic with that colour scheme. OS level dialog boxes, not just in Windows, but also in various Linux flavours that violate dark mode as well.

For the record, I know I’n having a whinge and, in the past, I wouldn’t have even registered any of this, but that’s kind of the point I’m making. Until something happens to you that forces you to perceive the world in a different way, it’s all too easy to forget that people who are differently abled might not get to access what you’re offering. For all of you out there who create, whether it be writing, or software, or movies and TV, if you can, make a choice to think about how someone else might access your work.