3 ms·
I have a degenerative eye disease. As one of its features is loss of visual acuity, my driving days are numbered. When they come to an end, I'll likely have to
by pxc 2y ago
I have a degenerative eye disease. As one of its features is loss of visual acuity, my driving days are numbered. When they come to an end, I'll likely have to move, as it's just not possible to efficiently or affordably get around in environments other than urban when you're blind.
Another feature of my condition is extreme light sensitivity, and difficulties with contrast. I generally need a lot of it, but at the same time, bright light washes out everything around it, blinding me. That feature seems to be progressing more rapidly than the loss of acuity in my case. Consequently, the extreme brightness of headlights nowadays is likely to cut my night driving still shorter, perhaps by years.
If you're not facing such a prospect yourself, it can be difficult to appreciate what a loss of freedom and ease it is to give up driving. It sucks bad.
I hope these overbright headlight haters continue to gain traction!
- BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 2y agoCataracts are commonplace in older drivers. Until the operation is done driving at night can get you dazzled. But if you get the fancy multifocal lenses, you will get halos.
- pxc 2y agoThat's a good point! Overly bright headlights are a problem for a lot of kinds of eyes, including some we should expect to see more than a few of on the road. (I will say for myself that my contact lenses have long been thick enough to cause the same kind of halos, and I also have mild astigmatism, so I'm used to seeing those symmetrical light patterns smearing over everything. Those cam be distracting for sure, but the light sensitivity issues I have are more like the moment you step directly out of a dark movie theater into the sunlight on a clear, bright day— visual information just disappears in the face of overwhelming brightness so that things are washed out, and there is often pain. In my experience, halos are more like overlays on the visual field and astigmatism artifacts are sparser with longer radius (not covering the whole range of angles surrounding the light source but jutting out vary far in long, stretched spearheads rotating almost kaleidoscopically).