How Can I Improve The Lighting in My Home If I Have Low Vision?

Video Transcript:

Today, we're going to talk about lighting, and most things, I like to think about the thing before the thing. So lighting is a solution. But the question usually is, what's the problem before we start solving it? We really want to take a little bit of time and examine the problem so that we're not coming up with Band-Aids.

We're coming up with practical and functional solutions to problems. So lighting is a solution. And the problem oftentimes, most of the time, comes down to contrast. And what contrast is, is the kind of difference between what you're trying to look at and the background of what you're trying to look at. Now, typical eye exams are not particularly helpful at identifying if you have a problem with contrast, because if you've done an eye exam recently, you are looking at black letters on a white background in a very well-lit environment.

And from that circumstance, they measure your visual acuity, and that's not particularly helpful because when you go out in the real world, how much of the time are you looking at black letters on a white background in a very well-lit environment? Probably not all that often. So when we talk about improving contrast, it's important to kind of understand what contrast is and some of the problems that you may encounter.

So this is, so I just printed this off of our printer, but this is, this is a photo of a contrast test. And what this is, is the first one is very, very dark. So that's your black letters on white backgrounds. And then it gets progressively more light. So the difference between the background and the foreground is less detectable as you get lighter.

And when we talk about lighting, what we're using lighting for is to take something that you have trouble detecting the background, and you want to improve your ability to detect the background. So what that's going to, well, there's a little bit of a side quest there is that you also want to make sure that you don't introduce unnecessary noise into your visual system, so that unnecessary noise is known as glare.

So what glare is, is more light than you need, and light coming from places that you don't want it to be. So glare can come in many forms. Overhead lighting can be glare, reflections off of various surfaces can be glare. The light that you're using to illuminate what you actually want to look at can be a source of glare.

So when we are talking about solving this problem, it's important to recognize the ideas of contrast and glare. So one of the things that you might notice if you have presbyopia, if you have macular degeneration, if you have any vision condition where it becomes hard to read, it's going to be challenging to see smaller print.

That's the first thing you're going to notice. And one of the things that's interesting is that a lot of times one of the solutions there is going to be glasses. So glasses will make the smaller print seem bigger. And in doing that, you improve your ability to read it. But oftentimes, you can read smaller prints if you light it well enough.

So what that looks like. So I have a lamp here and a couple of forms of lamps. So one of the challenges with lighting is not producing glare when you are producing the light you need. And there's also this kind of side thing, is that so you want to read in bed and there's an ideal amount of light, and there's somebody who sleeps next to you who's trying to sleep is you want to maybe not annoy everybody around you.

In the process of creating the light you need. So, so this, so this is a lamp from Schweitzer, that has a couple of different features. That's pretty cool. So the one is, it has the actual light. It can be adjusted. So when we adjust the light, you want to adjust the light so it floods what you want to read with light, but you also don't want to be looking straight at it.

So if I'm looking at this, I want the light to flood this with light. But if I position it in such a way that the light floods what I'm trying to look at and also floods my eyes, that's going to be less effective. So you want to position it in such a way that it floods just what you're trying to look at.

So there's two components that I would consider critical when you're trying to select a lamp is one being the colors available. So this particular lamp has a yellow light, a white light, and a bluish light. And each one of those versions produces a different kind of perception of the page. The other thing is adjustable lighting. So if you can increase or decrease the amount of light on the lamp so that it's lighter or darker, that's also helpful.

And that helps minimize glare and potentially reflections off of your reading material. So, that's, so this is a cool lamp. It's very functional. If you're sitting at a place and you're doing a thing now, chances are I don't know what your sleeping arrangement is like, but you probably don't want to bring this into bed.

So if you wanted to read in bed or something like that. There's other devices, other ways of doing lighting. So this particular thing just goes around your neck and gives you light. Now, is the light of as high of a quality as this? No. But it gets the job done in certain circumstances. So I tend to, as I've said, view this all as a big science experiment and figuring out what is best for you.

And I think it's important to consider lighting in your household and how lighting affects you functionally in various situations. The other thing that is worthy of consideration is if you have lamps and lights in your house, take a look at the light bulbs and how powerful or how weak they are. And this is, this is actually a trick I learned from a painter.

Is that, so if somebody does a really poor job on painting, they will use lower wattage, lighter bulbs and put those in so that you don't notice that they did a bad job in painting. So, if you've had your house painted recently, double-check that you didn't get brand new light bulbs.