Macular degeneration (MD) is a serious eye condition that reduces the sharpness of what you see.
MD literally means deterioration of the yellow spot, the macula lutea, The yellow spot is responsible for high-resolution, central vision.
AMD means age-related macular degeneration and is currently the leading cause of vision loss in Western society.
Some people with MD see a blurry or dark spot in the center of their point of focus. Others see distortions of the image, some see both. This has a big impact on, for example, recognising faces and facial expressions.
How does this affect readers of a website? When the center of your focus is dark and blurry, it is difficult to get a good overview of the content of a webpage. Readers with MD often zoom out so that they have a better overview of the entire webpage.
Beneficial for readers with MD is:
- Good colour contrast between text and it’s background
- A decent font size (16 pixels and up)
- A decent space between the lines of the text, depending on the font size
In fact, these improvements will benefit all readers.
In our course Writing accessible content for the web you will learn more about readers with a visual impairment.
