Nearsightedness would actually help quite a bit with fine work like this. Before presbyopia took hold with me, I could easily focus on my own nose, while things

Nearsightedness would actually help quite a bit with fine work like this. Before presbyopia took hold with me, I could easily focus on my own nose, while things started getting pretty blurry about three feet/one metre out. (These days, I have about a 10cm clear vision range uncorrected at an utterly useless distance, just at the limits of an arm's reach.)