Okay, so it’s taken a good bit of work to get here, but now we’ve arrived at the part you’re probably most interested in. What can we actually do to see better?

We’ll go over lighting, large-print books, magnifying glasses, extra-strong glasses, stand magnifiers, telescopes, advanced video magnifiers, iPads, and a whole lot more.

There’s a lot to cover with this, so get ready.

This is going to go on for a while. So we should get used to each other — settle back, pull up your cushions, or whatever else you have with you, that makes life bearable in Texas…

Lou Reed, speaking on The Velvet Underground Live 1969, End of Cole Avenue, TX

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There are three particular things I love about adding extra illumination.

1. It’s simple: Sources of extra light are widely available, and cheap. It might be a task lamp, or a torch (flashlight), or a booklight, or putting your computer or TV on to a brighter setting, or just simply taking something over to a sunny window.
2. It’s practical: Most interventions for extra light don’t require you to hold something in one hand, or move something precisely along a line of text, or hold it very steady. You can see the entire page in one go. You can arrange things to get extra light in your favourite chair, or in bed, or wherever else you want to be.
3. It’s effective: Extra light does something that magnification doesn’t do. Making something larger with a magnifier doesn’t really change how you eye works, but for some conditions cells that are damaged might not work properly in normal light, but might work fine in better light — that is, for some conditions (macular degeneration, for instance), extra light can literally improve your vision.

The key to using light effectively is to position it properly. That means getting it close to whatever you’re looking at, so all the light beams are concentrated in that spot, rather than being spread over a larger area.

People often say to me “Oh yes, I’ve got very good light in my house. The light fitting in the living room has the strongest wattage bulb I could get.” That’s good and fine, but it’s not what you need. That bulb is spreading its light over the entire room, and only a tiny fraction of it will be landing on the page of your book. It’s much more effective to add in a reading lamp that can be positioned quite close to your book — its bulb might not be as strong, but if it’s positioned well then all it’s light will be landing on your page, and you’ll see a big improvement.

In general, you want a reading lamp that can be positioned close to wherever you want to be, and with a flexible arm that lets the bulb itself to be positioned right above your book (or your craft work, or your work bench, or whatever else you’re doing). And the bulb itself should have an opaque shade, so it’s not becoming a source of glare.

No pun intended. But yes, they are brilliant.

Here’s an example of a really nice design of reading lamp, very suitable for positioning next to a comfortable chair. It’s the model we recommend in the Low Vision Clinic. It’s called the Sara floor lamp, but wherever you are in the world you should be able to find something similar.

What’s so nice about it?

• The shade is completely opaque, so no glare from the bulb even if you position it right in front of your head (although make sure the bulb isn’t so large that it pokes out from the shade)
• The arm is very easy to adjust to position the bulb right over the page.
• The switch is easy to use by elderly fingers, and it’s half-way up, so you can turn it on while you’re still sitting down (foot switches are a pain).
• The base is heavy but thin, so it can sit partly under your chair, letting it fit into narrow spaces.

A basic torch (flashlight) can be a handy companion to carry around with you. Hold it just a few inches from the page to get a beautifully bright circle of light.

Keep one in the pantry for helping you find what you need without having to pull every item out one by one to look at it.

For many people with less severe vision impairments, a pocket torch can be just as effective as (or even better than) a handheld magnifier.

Yes, I know, daylight isn’t a device. Even so — reading by a window is a great intervention. Make sure that the light from the window is landing on the page — some people tuck their chairs back a bit from the edge of the window, but then the light is coming from the wrong angle and doesn’t land on the page. And make sure you’re a bit side-on rather than facing directly away from the window, so your body isn’t shading the book.

Still, windows aren’t much help at night, so consider investing in a reading lamp as well.

Oh, magnifier lamps, how I love them!

They are so useful. Many people use them mostly as just a lamp, positioned over what they are doing for extra illumination. But when they encounter something a bit difficult, they change the angle of the head so they are looking through the lens, which gives a very effective combination of excellent light and wide-field low magnification.

This particular model is known as the Triumph floor-mounted lamp in Australia. It’s the Low Vision Clinic’s single most-prescribed item.

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Talking about magnifier lamps is a nice segue into… magnifiers.

There are several different types of magnification. You can use one, or you can use any combination — for instance, you can choose a larger print book and also use a magnifying glass. Whatever works for you.

• Magnification by Substitution: If you can’t see an object, change it for a bigger object.
• Magnification by Approach: If you can’t see an object, go closer to it.
• Magnification by Lens: If you can’t see an object, make a bigger image of it with a lens.
• Magnification by Video Enlargement: If you can’t see an object, make a bigger image of it using a camera and screen.
• Magnification by Combination: Use two or more of the above methods at the same time.

Let’s go through them in turn.

“You’re gonna need a bigger boat”

Jaws (1975)

This sounds like a complex thing, but it’s not. Just pick a bigger version of a thing instead. A nice simple example is choosing a large-print book, instead of normal print. Other examples include:

• Writing a shopping list or phone numbers in larger print, with a thicker-line pen (a texta or felt-tip is good).
• Choosing a telephone that has larger numbers on the dial, or a large-print computer keyboard
• Getting a larger-screen television.
• Getting a larger screen for your computer.

One of the really great reasons for using magnification by substitution is that it doesn’t have any of the downsides that can limit the usefulness of other magnifiers (see below). In particular, you can still use both your eyes at the same time, which is a wonderful help.

In a way, substituting something with a bigger version of that something is a form of cheating. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against cheating, and in fact I heartily encourage it (in this context anyway). But this is very small potatoes. We’ll get on to the serious cheating later on in this chapter.

“All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”

Sunset Boulevard (1950)

This is another simple one. We’re all familiar with it from our everyday life. We can’t read that street sign until we get closer to it. We’re not really sure if that’s our friend coming down the street until they get closer to us. A child sees an interesting bug, picks it up and peers closely at it. It’s even a part of our language — when something needs detailed investigation, we say it deserves ‘close examination.’

Close examination works. If you go twice as close to a thing, the image of it becomes twice as large. Ten times as close means ten times as large.

Simple solutions include:

• Sit at the front of the class, or the meeting room, or the cinema.
• Sit closer to your TV (if you’re an adult, there’s really no danger to your eyes from sitting even very close to modern televisions).
• Position your computer screen closer to you, mounted on a swing-arm if needed to avoid crowding the keyboard and mouse.
• Sit near the middle of a long table at gatherings, not at the ends.
• Hold your book closer.

The catch is we have to keep the thing in focus (here I’m talking about true optical focus, ensuring that the image landing on the back of the eye is properly focused). Further away things are no problem — there’s no significant change in focus between looking at something at a hundred metres away (330 feet) and ten metres away (33 feet). There’s not even much difference between ten metres away and one metre away. But when things are within arm’s reach, maintaining optical focus becomes important.

When things are within arm’s reach, maintaining optical focus becomes important.

The older we get, the more of a challenge it is to keep close things in focus. When we are young, the lens in behind our pupil is flexible, allowing us to adjust our focus from (relaxed) far-away vision to clear close-up vision. Little kids can focus remarkably close, which means they can see very fine details by just bringing the thing in very close to their eyes.

Young people with vision impairments can often use approach magnification very effectively, because they can simply bring things very close to their eyes and their natural focus ability lets them keep the object in clear optical focus. The word for that natural focusing ability is ‘accommodation’.

‘Accommodation’ is the technical word for the natural focusing ability we have when we’re young, and gradually lose as we get older.

But as we get older our natural lens becomes tougher and more leathery, so it takes more and more muscle effort to distort its shape to focus closer in. Eventually — by about age 55-60 — your lens has become completely rigid, and so you have no ability to shift focus (you have ‘no accommodation’). The solution is generally to get reading glasses, which do the close-focusing for you (that’s why reading glasses make vision more blurry for far away, because they are doing close focus all the time).

The whole point of reading glasses is not that they ‘magnify’ — it’s just that they keep things in focus at a particular distance, and it’s the viewing things at a closer position that makes them look bigger. If you want to view something at a particular distance — say 40cm (16 inches), which is a typical position to hold a book — then once the glasses are in focus for that distance, that’s as far as you can go.

“I am big! It’s the pictures that got small.”

Sunset Boulevard (1950)

I know, this is what you were probably thinking about when you first thought ‘magnification’. Devices that use lenses, stronger and weaker, bigger and smaller, in stands and handheld and on clips, in all their marvellous diversity. We’re finally here, and we’ll look at them all.

Bur first, some things you should know:

A big magnifier means it has low magnification

Smaller magnifiers could have high or low magnification

You can’t fully trust the ‘magnification’ rating

No, you can’t magnify the whole page in one go

Stronger magnification means even less field of view

Only lower-powered magnifiers let you use both eyes together

Remember the light!

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There’s more to magnification than just stronger or weaker. Magnifiers come in all sorts of different forms.

Which one is best? It’s kind of like asking which sort of car is best — people will argue for ages about it, but in reality the answer is there is no such thing as a ‘best car’ — it has to be what works for your individual needs. So the aim of this section is to give you an understanding of what each type of magnifier might be good (or bad) for, and you can see what might suit you best.

There’s a reason handheld magnifiers are what we think of first. They are very useful devices, versatile and compact, easily able to slip into a pocket or a purse.

The pictures here are of three decent quality magnifiers (all of these are from Eschenbach, a company that makes excellent quality magnifiers).

The first is ye olde basic magnifier. Low power (but good optics), nothing fancy. The other two are my preferred type, because they have built-in LED lighting (which — in case you haven’t read it the other dozen times I said it — really helps). The rectangular one is a lower power, the round one is a very high power, so it’s a good illustration of stronger magnifiers having a smaller window.

The downside of handheld magnifiers is that you must have a steady hand, especially for the stronger ones. If your hand wobbles, the image will wobble too, but by more. The stronger the magnification, the more extreme the image wobble will be. You also need to hold it the right distance away from the page (stronger magnifiers focus closer to the page than weaker ones), and if you can’t hold that steady then the image will go in and out of focus.

Stand magnifiers largely solve the issue of needing a steady hand, since you steady the magnifier against the page itself. The three pictured above are also by Eschenbach. The first and third have built-in LED illumination, while the middle one is an older style that doesn’t have a light, so you’re relying on the light that comes in around the sides.

The downside of a stand magnifier is ergonomics, because it’s more tricky to align your eye, the magnifier and the page. You have to be looking straight into the magnifier, which means you either lean right over the top of it, or you hold your text or place it on a sloped surface and then hold the stand magnifier in place on the sloped surface. Having to hold it there takes away some of the benefit of it being a stand.

I’ve already talked about my love of magnifier lamps in the Illumination section above. They are kind of 50/50 illumination and magnification, so I’ll talk about them some more in this section.

Magnifier lamps tend to be relatively low magnification, but they are still remarkably useful. Even if you need something more powerful to read normal print, a magnifier lamp is still likely to be a benefit. Think of it this way: no matter how good or bad your vision is, there will always be things that you can almost see, but not quite. Whenever you encounter one of those situations, adding the combination of mild magnification and excellent light has a good chance of making it able to be seen.

Magnifier lamps tend to be relatively low magnification, but they are still remarkably useful — especially because they are hands-free.

One of the standout features of a magnifier lamp is that it’s hands-free, which means you can use two hands to hold the book or whatever else you’re doing. And it can help you with other tasks that inherently need two hands, like clipping your nails, or helping you see what you’re doing while you’re replacing the batteries of your handheld illuminated magnifier. And of course crafts such as needlework need two hands — in fact, most magnifier lamps we use were actually designed as craft aids, rather than low vision aids.

A magnifier lamp can also be helpful for looking at your mobile phone, but if it’s a smartphone then its screen is self-illuminated, so you’d probably be better switching off the light in the magnifier lamp so you don’t get reflections off the screen.

Magnifiers that sit out in front of your eyes (either attached to a head strap or to a pair of glasses) are another good hands-free option. You have to hold whatever you’re looking at much closer than you would using a magnifier lamp, but they have a large field of view and there are higher magnification options available.

They don’t tend to have built-in illumination, so make sure you’ve got a task lamp to illuminate what you’re looking at.

You can wear these in conjunction with strong reading glasses, so you can use just the glasses to see the broader picture and then swing the magnifier down to see the detail when needed.

Here in Tasmania, I’ve been amused by the number of patients who say they have a need for something like this so they can see what they’re doing when sharpening their chainsaw. I suppose you don’t need to see fine detail to be able to chainsaw things, but it’s still not the sort of thing you tend to think of vision-impaired people doing. I recognise that’s just my own preconception though — as long as you’re being sensible and safe (for you and for everyone else), do what you need to do.

So, what if you don’t want to go closer? And what about really far away things? I mean, you can’t use a magnifying glass to figure out the number on that bus coming up the street. You can’t use a magnifier lamp to read the departures board at the airport. And you can’t use a stand magnifier to see your TV better.

Magnifiers normally work for things you can touch, but things that are out of reach are more tricky. The simple answer is to go closer, but when that’s not a workable solution then what you need is a telescopic lens system.

Telescopic systems use multiple lenses with a gap in between them, so they can be heavy and bulky. Apart from that, there are a few other challenges with telescopic systems.

• You have to point them very accurately at what you’re looking at, and it can be tricky to hold them steady. The stronger the magnification, the more the image tends to bounce around. It can get to a point where you’d be able to see the thing, if only it would keep still!
• The field of view is restricted. Again, the stronger the magnification, the smaller the field of view. That can make it quite challenging to find the thing you’re looking for, and you might have to scan around for a while (not great when the bus is rapidly approaching!). The restricted field of view also means you should never try to walk around while looking them.
• The depth of field is narrow, so if you switch to looking at something at a different distance you’ll need to refocus.
• The image is bigger but dimmer.

Still, even though telescopic systems can be a challenge to use, they are often the only solution when you can’t just go closer.

A commonly used telescopic system is a pair of binoculars, which can be a very effective aid if you have a vision impairment. Even if you only have one eye, the fact that you can hold them with two hands and prop them against your brow makes them easier to hold steady and point accurately. And you don’t look too out of place carrying some binoculars.

On the other hand, a monocular telescope can be very discreet, able to be concealed in your hand, ready for use. Hold them in your hand with your thumb and index finger around the eyepiece, so you can prop your fingers against your brow (kind of the same way you’d hold the binoculars, but with just half of them).

Spec-mounted systems can be helpful for specific purposes, but I need to remind you — don’t try to walk with them on.

Video magnifiers are often called CCTV magnifiers. CCTV stands for ‘closed-circuit television’, because that’s what the early ones were — just a camera attached directly to a screen display, just like security systems. You zoom the camera and the screen shows you a magnified image of whatever it’s pointed at. It’s a simple partnership, but one that’s amazingly effective.

There are two main types of CCTV magnifier:

Desktop CCTV magnifiers, which come with a screen that is about sixteen to twenty-four inches. These have the highest magnification and widest field of view of any magnifier. You move the document around under the screen and a camera shows a magnified image of the document on the screen.

Portable CCTV magnifiers, which have smaller screens (from three to thirteen inches). The smaller ones can easily fit in a pocket or purse, while the bigger ones are a bit more hefty, about the size of a laptop computer. With most of them you put the magnifier directly on the document and move the magnifier around, rather than moving the document. Some come with a stand to put the magnifier in, which turns it into a kind of miniature desktop CCTV.

The catch with video magnifiers is that they are usually fairly expensive, although nowadays some of the smaller ones are not that much more than the cost of a decent-quality optical magnifier.

I fine some patients are initially worried that a video magnifier will be too complicated for them. It happens especially with older patients, which I suspect is because the desktop units remind them of computers, which many of them aren’t comfortable with using. But relax — they are actually extremely simple. Mostly they just have a dial that you use to make the image bigger or smaller, and another dial that switches between the different contrast settings. But the combination of those two simple settings is powerful, opening up a great range of magnification options.

Apart from documents, I find that many of my older patients really love desktop magnifiers to be able to look through albums of old photos. It’s important to remember to move back to the colour setting, since the high-contrast settings are great for print but they make photos look terrible.

If what you have is a physical document, (a letter, a book, a newspaper, a bill), then you need some form of actual magnification: choose one of the options discussed above.

But if you can get an electronic version of that same document, then you have a wonderful freedom in determining how it gets displayed on the screen of whatever device you have. For instance, if you can get an eBook version of a book, you can display it on your iPad or computer with whatever size and colour print you like best. Same if you have a digital subscription to your local newspaper, or you get your utility bills emailed to you, or a friend writes you an email instead of a letter.

Technically, this is yet another form of ‘substitution’ — just the same as reading a large-print book instead of a copy with normal print. But it’s such a massive shift in how we access printed information that it’s worth considering separately. As time goes on, an ever increasing number of us have at least one way of getting information through the internet, even if it’s just a smartphone. The emphasis on low vision rehabilitation will shift more and more to how we manipulate the image displayed on those devices’ screens, rather than magnifying anything physical. Sure, there will always be a need for help with seeing real physical objects, but as more and more of our text-based communication becomes available in electronic delivery methods, the advantages will make ever more sense.

Since the magnification can be done on-screen, the most important variable becomes the field of view, since that’s what determines how well you can see the information in context and efficiently navigate through a document. Screen sizes range from the smallest of smartphones, through the tablet devices and laptops, all the way up to the largest of desktop computer screens.

One way to get a bigger screen is to get a bigger device. But the other way is to make the screen look bigger by changing your viewing distance, which of course is ‘approach’ magnification.

Which brings us nicely to using different types of magnification together.

I’ve already emphasised that it’s really important to get good light as well as whatever magnification you’re using.

But it’s worth thinking about combinations of different types of magnification too — they can be very effective. Here are some examples:

• How about a large-print book and a magnifier? If the print is larger, then the magnifier doesn’t need to be so strong, which means a better field of view.
• How about a larger setting on your phone or tablet, and have stronger glasses so you can hold it closer? A five-inch-screen smartphone held 20cm (8″) from your eye would have effectively the same screen size (we say it ‘subtends the same angle’) as an ten-inch-screen tablet held at 40cm (16″). That same tablet held at 20cm would subtend the same angle as a massive thirty inch desktop computer monitor would at 60cm (24″). As long as you have the right strength glasses to keep the screen in focus at that close distance, it should be just as easy to see. (Remember though, there is a practical limit to how close you can bring your device, in that you need room to move your hand so you can touch the screen).
• Sit at the front of the class and use a telescope. Being closer means you don’t need such a strong scope, so it will be lighter and easier to hold steady.

As we discussed in Chapter 3, when it comes to printed material we can’t actually improve the contrast, because we can’t independently manipulate the brightness of the background and the print. So everything we do to improve contrast involves substitution, generally by replacing it with a higher contrast image of the document on a screen (that is, using an electronic CCTV magnifier or getting an electronic version of the document).

But for things other than print, you sometimes can make interventions that can help:

• Television: most TVs can have their contrast enhanced. Every TV is a bit different, but usually you can use the remote to get into the TV settings and play with the contrast settings, boosting the brighter bits and darkening the darker bits. You may also be able to ‘saturate’ the colours (sometimes called a Vivid setting), which compensates for the way many eye conditions make it hard for you to see very pale colours. Have a play and see what looks good for you. Someone with normal vision would probably judge the picture as oversaturated or lurid, but you do what’s best for you.
• Computer, tablet and smartphone screens: again, you can generally get into the display settings and increase the contrast and saturate the colours. While you’re there, don’t forget to look into the brightness and default print size!
• Arts, crafts, and sewing: make the artistic choice to use bold colour contrast rather than subtlety. Dark thread on a light background, brave colour choices on your paintings — go wild.

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This is where we seriously get into the area that you might call cheating. Take a ‘high altitude’ view — what exactly are you needing to achieve, and why? Could you achieve that another way?

Again, even if we call these ‘cheats’, they are totally legitimate options. Be open to whatever works.

There are a whole range of devices now that use a camera to ‘see’ a document, analyse the text and convert it into speech. This is called Text-To-Speech, and you’ll sometimes see it abbreviated as TTS.

• CCTV magnifiers: there are both desktop and portable CCTV video magnifiers that offer TTS. I particularly like Optelec’s Clearview C Speech.
• Smartphones & tablets: Apps like Microsoft’s Seeing AI can be extremely useful for reading text. SeeingAI is constantly evolving, and is both powerful and free! Check it out.
• Standalone devices: These are devices that don’t have any screen for visual output — they are speech only. They include desktop devices such as Optelec’s ClearReader, but also miniature handheld or spec-mounted devices such as the Orcam range.

TTS options can be an excellent option for some people, but they’re not for everyone. In particular, there’s often quite a learning curve — getting used to a whole new way of ‘reading’ text can be just too big a hurdle for some people.

Accuracy is pretty good with most TTS these days, but it’s not 100%. It can get tricked by longer words that are split across lines with a hyphen, and struggle if the print is smudged, or even if the paper is creased or not evenly illuminated. It can have trouble with names of people and places. An advantage of TTS devices that are also magnifiers is that they also display the print they are reading, so if a word doesn’t seem to fit you can pause the voice and look back at a highly magnified image of that word to check what it should have been.

With TTS, there’s the challenge of ‘navigating’ through the document to find what you really want to know. How many of us actually read everything that’s on our electricity bill or our bank statement? It can be super annoying to scan a letter or a bill and have to listen to all the company address information in the letterhead before you get to anything helpful, and a bill can be just a long stream of useless information before you find out how much you owe.

Some systems let you choose which part of the page you want read out, so if you’re familiar with the bill and know where the amount to pay should be you can target that directly.

But newer systems are starting to emerge that use AI to help you quickly get the information you need. For example, you can ask the device what the letter is about, and it will tell you a quick summary rather than reading the whole letter out. Or you can show the device a bill and ask it to tell you what the total amount owed is and the due date. Examples include some of the Orcam range of devices. I expect to see them appear in desktop and portable CCTV magnifiers too.

The claim is that you can speak with the device just as if it were a person next to you. How well do they work in reality? I’m not sure, I’ve had very limited opportunity to play with them so far (at time of writing this, in mid-2025). But the whole area of AI is moving so rapidly that as soon as I write something it will be out of date. If it’s not true now, it will be true soon. So I’ll just say that the technology is coming — or already here — and it’s going to be a game-changer.

No, this isn’t some creepy horror movie. We can’t do eye transplants that will provide vision yet (and it’s not likely that we will any time soon — the connection to the brain through the optic nerve is exceedingly complex).

But there’s no harm in asking other people to read something for you. I mean, I’m not tall, so I sometimes ask one of my tall kids to get something off a high shelf for me. Sure, I could go and find a stepladder, but if they’re right there…

But that’s not a great option if you’re by yourself. You can’t rely on other people being around 100% of the time, so it’s important that you have other ways to get information.

Smartphones have opened up a whole new way to use someone else’s eyes. An example is the Be My Eyes app. When you need help, the app connects you with someone from its network of volunteers. You point your phone camera at the thing you need help with, and tell them what you need to know, and they tell you — simple! They have millions of volunteers across the world, so there’s always someone who can help you, any time of the day or night.

Even if you have other magnifier or scanner options, I think it’s advisable to register with Be My Eyes and know where the app is on your phone. You never know when you might need it.

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