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Ramón's User Experience

Summary

I have retinitis pigmentosa which causes a narrow field of vision (about 5 degrees) and very poor contrast sensitivity, yet I still have a relatively good visual acuity. I need light text on a dark background. I sometimes use the high contrast setting in the OS, but it doesn't work well in some programs. Sometimes it will pick up one of the colors but not the other (e.g., background but not text, or viceversa), which makes the text invisible or almost unreadable with due to its low contrast. I use Firefox and the Stylish add-on with a global style sheet, as well as the zoom-text-only feature. I've tried PDF reflow but it usually doesn't work well (e.g., graphics overlap text, or simply the PDF is not properly developed to reflow), so I gave up on it.

On this page:

My vision

I have retinitis pigmentosa, a retinal degenerative disease that provokes the death of photoreceptor cells in the eye.

I have a narrow field of vision (about 5 degrees), but I still have a relatively good visual acuity (about 0,3 both eyes), so I can read on screen with an almost normal font. I can even read 9pt, but my personal preference is between 14-20pt.

In addition, I have very poor contrast sensitivity, and the problem is worse with white backgrounds due to dazzling. I can distinguish colours, but I see them less saturated, so sometimes it is difficult to distinguish certain colours when they have similar levels of brightness (especially over a white background).

I need light text on a dark background.

Web use

I use Firefox and the Stylish add-on with a global style sheet, as well as the zoom-text-only feature.

Before I knew how to apply stylesheets to any web page, I used to copy the text from a web page and paste it into Word or other text editor so I could format it to read it.

PDF

I've tried PDF reflow but it usually doesn't work well (e.g., graphics overlap text, or simply the PDF is not properly developed to reflow), so I gave up on it.

System settings

I sometimes use the high contrast setting in the OS, but it doesn't work well in some programs. Sometimes it will pick up one of the colors but not the other (e.g., background but not text, or viceversa), which makes the text invisible or almost unreadable due to its low contrast.