by Ean McDonald - May 10th, 2017

Those of us with glasses have come to the stark reality that eyesight sometimes declines as we gain more experience. Not only that, sometimes a career of staring at a computer screen for a living can be detrimental on eyesight.

I'm here with help! There are some things you can do to give your eyes a break.

1. Some people dislike the very bright, white backgrounds to apps. Not only does it use up more power on your display, but it blasts light into the back of your retinas. This is particularly blinding later at night. One thing that could help is changing Windows 10 to Dark Mode.

Go to Start > Settings > Personalisation > Colors. Scroll down and select "Dark" under "Choose your default app mode". While you're in this menu, you can change the default window colour to one that you like more, or you can select the box near the top "Automatically pick an accent colour from my background". This will try to select a colour complimentary to whatever picture you've chosen for your background.

1a. Similarly, you can select "Background" in the Personalisation menu to the left, and choose a background picture that is easier on the eyes.

2. Ease of Access. Next, head to Settings > Ease of Access.

The first option is Narrator. I wouldn't recommend this unless you really have difficulty seeing. If you're interested, you can toggle the option to On under "Narrator".

The Magnifier can be a powerful tool, although it may take a while to get used to it. It zooms the screen by 200%, and the focus will scroll along with your mouse pointer.

Before turning on the magnifier: understand that to close it after you're finished with it, you can left click on the semi-translucent magnifying glass near the top left of the screen. A window will open with various options, and you can click the X to close this feature.

If you like the magnifier, take note that there are other options that can customize your experience. Instead of the screen tracking where your mouse cursor is for instance, you could have it follow wherever you're typing.

High Contrast next in the menu changes the colour scheme so everything is more stark. I believe all of the options remove any custom background picture you have in favour of a plain white or black image. You can try out a few of the options and see if it helps or not.

After I tried to choose the "None" option, to get back to my regular theme, it wouldn't reset for me. I panicked a little, but when I regained my composure, I decided to search Google for "Windows 10 high contrast mode turn off". I found an article saying that I'd perhaps have to go back to the main theme settings and choose one of the regular themes. Right click anywhere on the desktop, then select Personalise. Then you can click Themes in the left menu, and any theme that you prefer will return Windows to more regular settings.

The Closed captions option allows you to customize colours and style of the closed captions that can be displayed when you're watching videos.