And other musings during post-op recovery.
I’ve been bespectacled from the age of 7. While my spectacles allowed me to live life in full HD, they were heavy and would slide off my face over the course of the day. Last weekend, I finally took the leap to get my eyesight corrected through a LASEK procedure — a bladeless corrective procedure which has a slower recovery compared to the traditional LASIK. The thing is, like most things in life, you need to suffer a bit if you want to get better. To achieve 20/20 vision, you’d have to experience poor vision all over again. And this time, wearing spectacles won’t help.
Some 21st century concerns surfaced. How would I check my messages? Watch Netflix? Navigate on Google Maps? This inconvenience was temporary but it was also very real for someone like myself, who would spend the next 3 days thinking about ways to kill time without my devices.
As a Telegram user, I was already familiar with the ability to change the font size from within the app. And so I did. I couldn’t see much at this point but I could make out the shapes from a familiar interface so I prodded around for the correct setting. In a matter of seconds, I was able to read my messages! It wasn’t easy but at least it was visible.
Though the input remained small so I’d make the occasional typo
And it occurred to me that a similar effect could be achieved on the phone through a global setting. I located the Font and Screen Zoom controls pretty easily on my device under Display but missed the settings for Accessibility which was near the end of the list. Most apps I tried handled this font size increase surprisingly well.
On Day 4, my eyesight was still hazy but the pain had subsided and I was keen to return to work (albeit from home). However, the laptop posed a different problem as the screen was further from my face (nearer was clearer). Display had limited text size options. The zoomed in display also warped the UI on some websites.
Under Accessibility, there were some interesting features like being able to increase the cursor size and turning the display grayscale. The Zoom feature didn’t work on apps like Slack so I would just lean forward from time to time.
