Early Onset Vision Loss In Children
Nigel Dupree
Project Director at S.M.A.R.T. Foundation - also known as: Legin Nyleve, LeginNyleve and @l3gin on other Social Media
Maybe Government and Health & Safety Executive expediently ignoring the Occupational Health Risk to Display Screen user operators for fear of vision related ergonomic "retrospective health claims for vision-loss" but, omitting to act on the now contributory "Chain of Causation" in the 21st Digital Century by failing to address the needs of children NOT acceptable.
"School Myopia" a disease from the past Industrial Revolution has been common knowledge for centuries quietly dismissed in the 1960' as solely an inherited vulnerability ignoring the widely research based evidence surrounding environmental risk factors of spending prolonged periods near indoors deprived of natural daylighting.
1990 did see the EU introduce a directive addressing repetitive stress injuries linked to Manual Handling and DSE operators in the workplace and maybe an excuse, at that time, for the UK to omit DSE ergonomic and only include the users workstation regardless of the name on the tin, 1993 UK DSE Regulations however, in 1998 Display Screen Equipment was also omitted from the PUWER Act, Provision & Use of Work Equipment Regulations, legislation designed to ensure operators were enabled to make custom "Reasonable Adjustments or Accommodations" to prevent or mitigate the foreseeable / predictable risk of "Repetitive Stress Injuries"
By 2007 the Health and Safety Executive did commission Meta Research on the occupational health of DSE operators and maybe stunned by the resulting findings as, 58% of operators reported eye-strain now called "Screen Fatigue" and later recognised as "Computer Vision Syndrome".
Nevertheless, this study has remained gathering dust on the shelf until 2016 when the WHO International Classification of Diseases identified "eye-strain" as a Global causal factor in a range of visual stress related adaptations under the generic heading of "Asthenopia"
Whilst it seams "Contrast Sensitivity" has been recognised as a common visual stressor resulting in the provision of a generic minimal standard applied to Websites, 2018 WCAG 2.1 - "4.5:1 Colour Contrast Validation", DSE the primary interface for the IOT has been omitted although, in compliance with UK Government Accessibility Regulation Higher Education is working toward "Colour Contrast Calibration" in the preparation of more Accessible learning and e-learning materials.
By way of a little bit of a Flash-back to 2014 when it had been discovered that "unnatural visual images" caused significant discomfort, potentially presenting in avoidance, due to excessive cognitive effort or stress to process these images particularly text based stripey images.
Accepting the Irlen Syndrome has continued to be a controversial subject surrounding subjectively prescribed "Coloured Overlays" as an aid to reading more fluently along with Wilkin's Optometer as a device to aid prescription of Colour Tinted Glasses with or with refractive prescription and whether called Irlen Syndrome or Asthenopia the lack of custom Reasonable Adjustments or Accommodations to "Colour Contrast" significantly reduces the risk of eye-strain, progressive myopic and asthenopic disease linked directly to "Contrast Sensitivity"