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I'm a developer with a vision problem. I was where you are now when I was 25. I've been waiting for somebody else to finally say fonts and displays had gotten too small, even for people with normal eyesight. Getting a bigger magnifier isn't the solution. Printing things in a readable font in a readable point size is.
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I find I have to do the document zooming trick on 99% of all things I enter these days, it's a royal pain in the a55
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My wife was a dental hygienist and has these glasses with built-in magnifiers. I have to borrow them sometimes to see this stuff!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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And while you're at it programmers, insert breaks in credit card numbers. 16 digits is hard to accurately read in. For a perfect example of a best practice, go change something on a bitlocker protected device and boot it. As you enter the recovery key the entry field automatically adds hyphens to match the recovery key blocking.
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It's not us! You should blame the designers who insist that all that text must fit in that tiny space! My favorite at the moment is an annual report by month where each month is a column and should be displayed whether or not there is data. Of course, it needs a total column and enough room for a 50-char description. That's a long description column (variable at least) and 13 data columns that must fit on a landscape print. From experience, 8pt is the minimum depending on the expected size of data and formatting. 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
"Hope is contagious"
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And then there's the paper forms you need to fill in. Then try and write "veryLong.emailAddress@whoTookAllTheShortDomainNames.com" into a space an inch wide.
Nothing succeeds like a budgie without teeth.
To err is human, to arr is pirate.
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Ha! Take your annual report and trump it with a monthly report which has to show the data (three different points per item) with the months of the year (pre-set for all twelve) PLUS the same again - but this time for accumulated monthly figures totals...and don't forget the little (colour-coded) up/down arrows to show if performance has improved or not... 
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It's not just programmers. There are also idiots who think people sign the back of credit cards in 8-point font.
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Greg Utas wrote: There are also idiots who think people sign the back of credit cards in 8-point font.
You bother with that?
It's not much of a security feature given that you can "sign" credit card transactions with little more than an X.
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The most recent card I received can't even be signed, so maybe they're ending it now that cards have PINs. But I've had the signature checked in the past.
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I've stopped signing mine a few years back, after I read some story about a guy at a restaurant who was refused to complete a transaction (after signing the receipt for the meal) because there was no signature on the back of his card. So he then signed the back of the card, and the waiter then proceeded to compare the signature on the receipt with the one on the card...
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I used to write “Check ID” on the back of mine but very few people would do that so now I don’t even bother doing that.
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We're running tests with 3pt font.
The tortured screams currently coming from our dungeon test panel indicate positive test results 
Your "I" and "O" remark gave me ideas and I just added a victim user story on our backlog 
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LOL. Literally. Not figuratively.
And the Oscar for "Best Strike-Thru in a Posting" goes to....
Sander!!!
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Welcome to my world. This explains the lighted magnifier on my desk.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Don't get me going with legibility issues introduced by programming ignorance. Low contrast. Artsy but Grrr.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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We developed a sales forecasting tool for use by our salesmen.
The sleaze — sorry, sales — manager took the software home on his laptop to test over the weekend.
He came back and reported that he couldn’t enter any data in any of the fields. He swore that he had done nothing to the software.
It took us a couple of days of wasted time to figure out that the sleaze ball — who didn’t want to forecast sales at all — had changed the input characters, which were white on a blue background, to blue on a blue background.
Maybe I should have tried to convince a jury of my peers, that is programmers, that this is a case of justifiable homicide,
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Justifiable exile from software.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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One of my hobbies is writing and recording music, mostly using MIDI software instruments. It seems that the programmers who create DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) like Cubase and Logic Pro, and software instruments from Native Instruments, Steinburg, Apple, etc., are very young folks with excellent eyesight who are able to read 4pt fonts, use scrollbars that are 1 pixel wide, 1 pixel away from their borderless windows. Apparently they think everyone can see that well, too, and don't need a way to change the font sizes. Bastmmmpff.
And that goes for you too, Microsoft.
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP.
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It's the low contrast that starts the problem. This artsy design fad has made it's way into numerous medical software interfaces. One day, someone will die because of it. Then, hello, standards. There is, in fact, a user interface standard which is human factored based (the official name escapes me) designed to avoid such habits. Sorry for rant. It's the artsy-ness aspect that gets to me. It's not professional software. MIDI's and DAW's software habits are bad ones for young programmers.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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The GOV.UK website is a past master at this kind of stuff. To renew your car road licence you are sent a form with a 16 digit number in four groups of four - just like a credit card number. The online form you have to type this into accepts a maximum of 16 characters including spaces. It doesn't ask you to leave the spaces out, accept or silently drop them, it just truncates whatever you type to 16 characters without warning.
If you don't notice this, when you get to the end of the page, having filled the rest of the form and clicked continue, it says there is something wrong with the data you entered, but without telling you what. (After many complaints it now seems to tell you which entry is wrong, but still won't accept the number in the format it is given to you!)
When you get to the next page you are required to pay - if you want to use a credit card, it will accept the card number (4 groups of 4 digits) in any valid format - with or without spaces etc and doesn't truncate after 16 characters.
I think this little example, present now for years, demonstrates the mindset of the Government Digital Service beautifully - they claim to be agile, to undertake extensive real life user testing etc etc, and yet this basic noob error in web page design persists despite complaints. As with so many other similar issues on GOV.UK, if you complain to the GDS team, they will say that the pages are looked after by another department and its not their responsibility...
A great shame because the work GDS has done in forcing UK government departments to standardise their IT infrastructure and site UIs getting disparate systems to work together is genuinely staggering, but - as with all things government around the world - the actual users themselves (and especially those without IT skills or unable to use computers well or even at all) are an irritating afterthought in the whole process.
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I agree with you and with the OP and others who complained about lack of contrast and other egregious problems.
However, I found that the GOV.UK site for reporting Covid test results was a model of accessible design. Text and data entry controls were adequately large and readable, even on tiny screens, and contrast was always good. Previous entries were remembered where relevant and entering the test number was a piece of cake by pointing the phone camera at the data matrix on the test. They deserve some kudos for all that.
Phil
The opinions expressed in this post are not necessarily those of the author, especially if you find them impolite, inaccurate or inflammatory.
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//www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/contrast-minimum.html
A contrast ratio of 3:1 is the minimum level recommended by [[ISO-9241-3]] and [[ANSI-HFES-100-1988]] for standard text and vision. The 4.5:1 ratio is used in this provision to account for the loss in contrast that results from moderately low visual acuity, congenital or acquired color deficiencies, or the loss of contrast sensitivity that typically accompanies aging.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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It's not you. We're misanthropes - we hate everybody.
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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