27/05/08
The Dumbing-Down of Sight Tests -
Categories: I had my eyes tested the other week, and now I have funky new glasses that make me look like an ad exec or the director of a fringe arty theatre piece. I know, I'm finding it hard not to punch myself in the face on a daily basis. But it only occurred to me over the weekend, while killing time in Liverpool for three days (I was hoping to spend the 3 days watching the new Indiana Jones film again and again, but I watched it once and never want to see it again), that the sight test I had was different from the old days. And it took two weeks to realise why...
I had a sudden realisation, when passing a Dollond and Aitchison on Sunday (I should never have eaten it), that the familiar sight test - the one with the massive letter at the top, then three on the next row, and so on - was made up this time of only a handful of letters. In my youth I remembered that the letters never repeated themselves (which was a way of cheating in itself - how could that little letter be a Z, when we had a Z on the previous line...?). But this new version had a bunch of As, a few Os, a T or two... Then it dawned on me:
They only use letters that look the same when mirrored and not mirrored.
I'm sure that didn't deserve its own paragraph, but in order to make this blog dramatic, I have to ask how Dan Brown would write it.
So, opticians nowadays - who of course view the back-to-front version of the sight test, cos they don't have a mirror to look in to read it - don't want to have to interpret mirrored letters. Probably some open letter was sent to the Journal of Optometrists (inevitably called 'Looking Forward' or 'Life Through A Lens' or something), complaining about the basic human right to be able to read letters that aren't mirrored in one's workplace. So the powers-that-be responded by making these sight tests much much easier by only using letters that baffle a mirror's attempts to confuse them.
So next time you go, you'll probably find it's all As, Hs, Is, Ms, Ns, Os, Ts, Us, Vs, Ws, and Xs. And if you're stuck and wondering if that's a T or an F, it's a T, okay? You should have spotted that as soon as you walked in the room, because now the letters work both ways, you can read it perfectly when you walk in, memorise it, and cheat. You may come away with glasses that don't work, but you'll at least have a great sense of victory.
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