Accessibility on devices for poor eyesight

About 10 days ago I blogged on my new-found appreciation for the accessibility settings in various devices to help me read on screen when my eyesight is poor Blurred vision giving me a new appreciation of web accessibility.

My particular problem is a side effect of large doses of the steroid Dexamethasone, which makes it look like I am wearing glasses with very smeared lenses that seriously need cleaning. Or there's a mist or smoke between me and whatever I'm looking at.

The devices I use the most are my iPhone (8+) and my Dell laptop (running OpenSuse linux Leap 15.4). The main apps I use are either native iPhone ones or browser-based apps on my laptop. I use the Vivaldi browser, which is very configurable for the various themes available. I also have a desktop PC running OpenSuse, but the room I use that in, our office, is much darker and I don't have as many problems with reading the screen there.

Here are some of the settings I have found the most useful so far. They are in order of what I found the most useful in most circumstances, to more specific to various apps. As a disclaimer, this is what has worked for me. Other people might have very different experiences. It's all trial and error, so leap in and fiddle with the settings; you can't break anything.

iPhone 8+

• The simplest thing is to maximise the contrast between text and backgrounds. Go into Settings / Display & Brightness. Select Dark and turn off Automatic so it stays dark all the time. That will give all (or most) of the native iPhone apps a black background with white text, which I find the easiest to read.
• You can select the Text Size to make it larger than Normal, and turn on Bold Text.
• Go to Accessibility. Under Display & Text Size there are a bunch of settings you can play with the improve visibility of the onscreen text. This includes the Text Size and Text Boldness found in the Display & Brightness settings.
• If you want to read long blocks of text and find it difficult, turning on some of the Spoken Content settings can help, particularly for apps where you have limited control over text size.
• Web apps that run in Safari can be controlled by settings in the Safari area in the iPhone settings. The only one I have found useful is the Page Zoom set to more than 100%. In my case it is 115% or 125%; any bigger than that and the button controls on the small screen lie over each other and you can't see them all. I have had to use this for the web app for Friendica because of the button size issue. It might be useful in other apps, but I haven't found them yet.

Vivaldi browser on Dell laptop

• Look in Settings / Appearances to select the Dark option under Website Appearance and check the box for Force a Dark Theme on All Websites. It doesn't seem to matter whether you use a light or a dark theme, as long as the contrast between background, button labels and text is strong enough for you.
• An alternative is to go website by website using the Page Actions icon at the bottom right of the Vivaldi window. It allows you to choose predefined CSS style sheets. Choose Filter Invert to swap dark text over a white background with white text over a dark background. There are also Filter Black and White and Filter Greyscale to experiment with but I haven't found them as useful as the Filter Invert style sheet.
• Under the Webpages setting you can set the default webpage zoom. I have it set at 140%, which is about right for me. You can also set Webpage Focus to Forms or all Controls and Links.
• Online editors I use, such as Mailbox.org Office, Cryptpad or Next Cloud seem OK in this, although some of the predefined element formats, such as Subtitle or URL, can be blue, which is no use against a black background.

Dell laptop (OpenSuse linux Leap 15.4) settings

• I use Joplin and Standard Notes quite extensively and they can either be set at a permanently Dark setting, or use one their high contrast themes. Standard Notes new Super markup option has larger text on the laptop than the standard Markdown, so I've tended to use that for many notes.
• I use LibreOffice Writer if I need a desktop word processing application, and you can change the options to white text over black background. There are themes that will alter the whole app window to high contrast, but I've found if I have to edit documents that include a lot of different contributions from other people, not all of them show the white text immediately without you manually modifying the formatting. I've noticed that with some committee minutes taken on a Mac laptop, which also include text sent from people who write notes in Word. However, I have found the standard black text on white background in the Writer editor window good enough — there's enough contrast for me to read it easily.
• You can install the Orca screen reader, but I haven't made any use of it because the other settings have been sufficient. It seems very ugly, but if I persisted I might be able to overcome that.