THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

Age starts to catch up with almost everyone in their 40's, especially with their vision.  You find yourself holding the menu farther and farther away, or squinting with one eye to make out blurry letters and figures, until you give in and buy a pair of reading glasses to correct your advancing far-sightedness.

Since the whole population is aging, you'd think the people who design our products would be cognizant of this problem, but they're not -- largely, I think, because engineering is a young person's game.  This is certainly true in the software business; those 23-year-old whiz-bangs don't think like the rest of us or see like the rest of us, which is why digital cameras, for example, come loaded with sub-sub-menus that are incomprehensible to laymen.  I'd include a picture of mine if I could figure out how to point the front of the camera at the back of the camera, but you get the idea.  At least the viewfinder has a diopter adjustment, so I can focus on what I'm focusing on. My wife's camera, which is newer, does away with the viewfinder altogether (people prefer, or are believed to prefer, screens, which suck power out of the battery like a weasel sucking eggs), and to use it, I have to don, of course, my reading glasses.

But let's stick with the vision thing.  Above are two control panels, the top one from our brand-new Hamilton Beach toaster oven, the bottom one the detachable face of our after-market Miata AM-FM-CD player.  Note the size of the words and numbers on the toaster oven, and their placement on the dials.  Not only do I have to put on my specs to operate them, I have to stoop down until I'm on the same level as the thing, because otherwise the bottom portion of the temperature range (top dial) and the length of desired cooking time (bottom dial) are hidden from view.

As to the sound system, I think it speaks for itself.  There are no fewer than 24 controls on the thing, most of them rocker switches with teensy-weensy numbers on them for mode, preset stations, and a host of other functions.  At 60 miles per hour, do you really want to be crouching to peer down at your radio, trying to remember where the volume control is or what you have to press to skip a track on a CD?

I could multiply these examples by a hundred; these happened to be handy.  There are exceptions.  Thank you, Kindle, for letting me choose the type size of whatever I'm reading.  And thank you iPad for letting me enlarge any portion of the screen just by pinching it.  But I wouldn't accept an iPhone if you gave me one, and my iPod isn't much better.

By the way:  if you're having trouble making out the details on the pictures above, you're proving my case.