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My father has about 20-25% vision impairment (with eye correction) and I would like to ask you about a monitor which could make his life easier (avoid sitting too close and straining eyes too much).

Typical display like 24" 1080p is too small for him. Of course it is possible to adjust resolution and/or DPI settings but it is not always fully supported and can be quite annoying.

To avoid limiting the work space, I would like to ask you about some display which could run in 1080p as its native resolution but having bigger diagonal (probably starting at 27 inches).

Must-have:

  • Screen size >= 27"
  • 1080p
  • Anti-glare coating
  • IPS/VA Panel

Nice-to-have:

  • Pivot
  • Flicker-free
  • Anti-Blue Light

Budget: up to $1200

Do you have any recommendation on that?

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  • How well would a digital projector fit into your specifications? You can find resolution capabilities over a wide range, with different illumination intensities. With a movie screen sort of surface on which to display, you would have a variable screen size without resolution change.
    – fred_dot_u
    Sep 2, 2017 at 1:36
  • @fred_dot_u, yes, I was thinking about it. However, I am not sure how it looks in terms of daily use and heat emission. Is any of these products capable of being in use for 6-8 hours per day?
    – Pawel Gumiela
    Sep 2, 2017 at 9:12
  • a high intensity projector will have a bulb that generates quite a bit of heat, but the LED versions are not quite as bad. If there is no direct sunlight in the room, your ambient light conditions may handle the lower intensity models. Some of the models I've found fit the budget as well. LED models will not suffer from low life spans when used constantly.
    – fred_dot_u
    Sep 2, 2017 at 10:50
  • @terry_8 I think you will get away with spending a lot less than your budget, even only a third of it, so that is good news.
    – Edward Nunn
    Sep 3, 2017 at 21:20

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Couple things at play here, so I'll try to offer what I think would be the best comprehensive solution.

First, you want a 27-30" panel minimum, as far as size. It will allow for the monitor to be placed at a healthy visual distance without reducing how much area it takes up within his visual field, similar to how a 50" TV looks "smaller" when it's mounted on the wall 10' away from you. You also want that extra screen space to be able to adjust any accessibility software.

Examples of accessibility software for Windows would be the native Narrator software, NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) which is free open-source software, or Window-Eyes for MS Office or whatever the equivalent is called now. There are other options out there as well if none of these work for your dad.

Depending on if and how you implement any zoom features to enlarge text, resolution might come into play. If you're going to enlarge text to 150% or larger, I'd recommend a 1440p display over a 1080p. My reasoning here is that as you enlarge text the lines might become blurred or altered due to the ratio between the desired image size and the pixels-per-inch count. In my experience the higher definition displays tend to display enlarged text more clearly.

Finally, I'll link the following thread about programming font options below:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4689/recommended-fonts-for-programming

You can also find good lists by searching around the internet if that link dies. I recommend one of these because coders usually prefer fonts that have a high level of distinctiveness and differentiation between characters, which minimizes the chance that you will mistake a 1 for an l for a ] and so on. This is, for obvious reasons, also very helpful to the visually impaired. I believe that there are Chrome and Firefox extensions that will try to apply a given font to websites as well, so those might be worth looking into if your dad browses online a lot.

If you'd like to provide a list of desired specs and a budget, I'd be happy to look around for some models that would be a good fit. Best of luck!

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  • I'd like to add that instead of 1080p or 1440p, 2160p (4K) might be worth considering as an option. You can always set it to 1080p if all else fails without any resizing artifacts. There have been warm color profiles (anti blue light) on most crt/lcd monitors I have had (except B/W monochrome), this feature is said to have been a bit refined in newer models though I prefer software solutions.
    – LiveWireBT
    Sep 2, 2017 at 10:05

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