Thursday, October 19, 2023

Some things that might help you when you're reading things on your computer

These tips might seem like they're obvious to some, though it needs to be stated because I imagine a lot of people arent even aware. I was oblivious for a long time because I'm a dumbass.

Generally if you have eye issues, or you're just about anyone you might have trouble reading on your computer. For me my eyes are okay, but sometimes i have trouble concentrating on things on the screen. I use okay loosely as I'm not sure what's wrong with my vision.

You could size down your windows on your monitor, you dont need to use all of your screen real estate when your browsing the internet, or working in a word processor or chatting. If you're using a 1080p screen(or larger) text will spew across your screen and be harder to read as a result. Size down the window if you happen upon a website that's kind of hard to read maximized.

Drag the corners of the window until they're maybe half of the screen or when it's comfortable to read. Another side effect of not maximizing all your Windows on your screen is you can even have two next to each other. Sometimes that's handy having one thing open for reference while you're working on something.

Also look at scaling options on your operating system of choice if you're using a smaller monitor, or you're using a laptop or your vision is especially bad. Dont down the resolution of your screen, that will only make things harder to read.

While you're browsing the internet you can press the CTRL and + keys to up the size of the text. You can press CTRL - to make it less big and CTRL + 0 to reset it to the default if you went a little crazy sizing up the font.

Not sure about Chrome, but Firefox has a "reader view" it's the left of the bookmark icon, the bookmark icon looks like a star. Some pages it will not show up, you can click it and change whether or not the page is bright text on a dark background, you can change how long the lines of text are and you can also change the size of the fonts and the font itself to a different one you have a easier time with. This feature is handy because a lot website authors choose to pick this really light text on a white background which is really hard to read, at least for me. I prefer dark themed websites.

Generally, the higher the resolution of the screen the easier it'll be to read text on the screen, because of more pixels. So if you still have a old 720p monitor you might want to get something that is at least 1080p. Also monitors tend to be bigger nowadays which will also help.

Not sure if anything larger than 1080p the fonts will be easier to read. Might be the law of diminishing returns there. If that makes any sense. But the more pixels packed into one spot, your eyes are looking at less empty space in between the pixels. You cant see it, but it still makes things harder to read. At the time of this writing 1080p screens are pretty cheap, and you can even find them used since a lot of people are upgrading to higher resolution displays as those are coming down in price.

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