Alaskan Range: Computer Vision Syndrome
...Print can be read about 20 percent faster than the same text on computer screens because our eyes struggle to maintain focus reading computer text. Eyestrain results, but glasses with non-glare coated lens that are adjusted to monitor distances can help...
Greg Hill suggests other sources of help for coping with eyestrain resulting from reading text on screen.
The world’s poorer with the passing of Kim Peek, a man born with severe brain abnormalities who became the inspiration for the movie “Rain Man.” A recent Scientific American article said that Peek was born 58 years ago with an oversized head and was misdiagnosed as severely retarded. When he was six another doctor recommended lobotomization, but by then he’d read, and memorized, the first eight volumes of the family encyclopedias. Part-time tutoring began the next year, and at 14 Peek finished the high school curriculum, despite being unable to do things like button clothes. Then he discovered the wealth of books in the Salt Lake City Public Library and eventually had total recall of over 12,000 books.
Peek had savantism, defined by Scientific American as “an uncommon but spectacular condition in which people with various developmental disabilities, including autism, possess astonishing islands of ability and brilliance that stand in jarring juxtaposition to their overall mental handicap.” Peek was born without a corpus callosum, “the sizeable stalk of nerve tissue that normally connects the left and right halves of the brain.” His brain somehow forged backdoor pathways to connect itself, often with marvelous results. Some savants possess incredible memories, musical and artistic skills, or can calculate enormous numbers and dates with remarkable speed, but Kim Peek still stood out.
Known to his friends as “Kim-puter”, Peek began memorizing books read to him at 18 months of age. His average reading speed was eight-to-ten seconds per page, and he could read both pages of an open book simultaneously, one page with each eye, and thereafter be able to “pull a fact from his mental library as fast as a search engine can mine the Internet.” Moreover, unlike most savants with powerful memories, Peek could “comprehend much of the material he has committed to memory.”
It all boils down to reading, and Computer Vision Syndrome is a growing concern. An online article titled “The Eye and the Computer Screen” explains that the difference between hard print and computer screen characters is that “Printed characters have crisp edges and high contrast levels making it easy for the eye to focus. Characters on the computer screen are less defined. Each character is composed of small dots of light that are bright in the middle and fade towards the outer edges. Just as the images fade, our eyes wander across the characters and have difficulty finding a focal point.” Even worse, computer monitors usually sit twenty-to-twenty-six inches from the viewer, right in between normal optical prescriptions for near and distance viewing.
CVS affects an estimated seventy percent of all computer workers, who grow more susceptible as they age. Print can be read about 20 percent faster than the same text on computer screens because our eyes struggle to maintain focus reading computer text. Eyestrain results, but glasses with non-glare coated lens that are adjusted to monitor distances can help. The EyeFatigue.com website also suggests using eyedrops every quarter hour, “AND, if you have the discipline necessary, then take frequent breaks from your work to look at a distance and blink frequently.”
E-book readers, like Kindles, avoid CVS by utilizing “E-ink” screens that produce sharp black text on grayscale backgrounds, so e-book “paper” appears slightly gray making it more eye-friendly. Wikipedia defines E-ink as “a type of electronic paper … a proprietary material that is processed into a film for integration into electronic displays, particularly for e-Readers.” Grayscale, according to the Random House Dictionary is “a scale of achromatic colors having several, usually ten, equal gradations ranging from white to black.” Grayscale allows illustrations, and text, to show up better in black-and-white. Visit http://ereaderguide.info/ to learn more and compare types of e-book readers.
Top-line Kindle, Sony and Nook e-book readers, for example, use 16 grayscale gradations, and also allow audio books and music to be downloaded from Listen Alaska, the library’s free online downloading service found on our webpage (http://FNSBLibrary.org). Print, MP3, e-books … like 5,000 years of librarian predecessors, we’ll continue collecting books in whatever form they manifest. Like the Bishop of Durham said in 1345, “You, O Books, are the golden vessels of the temple … burning lamps to be held ever in the hand.”
