For those elderly folk who suffer from one form of macular degeneration or another, it seems that ereaders offer an ideal solution to their problems with reading.
Macular degeneration is defined as follows:-
Macular degeneration is a silent and painless loss of central vision due to the degeneration or dying of cells in the retina, called the macula.
What is lost is the central portion of your sight – what you see right in front of you like the face of a person or the words in a book.
Obviously this will give tremendous problems when trying to read, as we use the centre of our field of vision to see the letters on the page – try to read a book only looking at the page from the edge of your field of vision – sort of looking off to the left or right and see how easy it is to read the page whilst not actually looking at it properly and you will see what I mean.
In fact there are a whole load of different versions of this particular eye problem, but they all entail the loss of centre field vision to one degree or another, and all, obviously effect how easy and pleasurable it is to read a book.
And this is where ereaders come into their own as opposed to regular printed paper books, which unless you buy yourself large print versions of whatever book you wish to read, the letters (fonts) are way too small for someone with this particular eye problem to see to any degree.
Added to which is the sad fact that not all books are published in a large font version, and generally they also cost more than their standard versions as well. So paper books are really not much use to those suffering from this particular form of eye problem – which is a quite large proportion of people over 65 years of age, sadly. Continue reading “Macular Degeneration and Ereaders”
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