You already know good things come in small packages. Your mother told you that.
What AFB TECH, the technology arm of the American Foundation for the Blind, wants to impress on you is that small packages can be even better than they already are.
While AFB TECH Director Mark Uslan probably doesn’t have anything against expensive jewelry, his specific reference is to small visual electronic displays found in cell phones, glucose and blood pressure monitors, alarm clocks and office equipment. Those are the kinds of small packages that give more than a little trouble to nearly 21 million Americans who suffer from vision loss.
“We’ve become a display-based society,” says Uslan. “And if you’re over 55, you know the problems we have reading cell phones.” Besides experiencing natural vision loss that can mean a trip to the optometrist for reading glasses, an aging population also becomes more vulnerable to diabetes and macular degeneration – two diseases that have a direct affect on vision.
The standard approach
Despite an obvious accessibility problem with small displays, AFB TECH learned that there are no published standards governing their characteristics. That’s why it joined with the Atlanta VA Rehab R&D Center on Excellence for Aging Veterans with Vision Loss to see how an existing mathematical model for large digital displays might apply to measuring small-display quality.
So far the study team has isolated nine variables that can affect the accessibility of small visual displays: resolution, luminance, contrast, spatial frequency, temporal frequency, glare, wavelength, font and display size. If you’re thinking that last variable, size, is the biggest troublemaker, Uslan reiterates that small packages aren’t necessarily bad.
“Everyone thinks it’s size or resolution, but it’s not.” Contrast, he says, makes the most difference when it comes to the visual accessibility of small displays. Implied in that contrast, he adds, is spatial frequency, or how close together dark lines are.
While there still are no conventional visual quality standards for small screens, AFB TECH and the VA Rehab R&D Center are giving manufacturers something to look at.
“We want to get on the radar screen of industry,” says Uslan, so companies ultimately recognize the problem and do something about it. He’s convinced that in nine out of 10 circumstances, small displays can be improved to deliver better visual accessibility.