Ageing eyes: the page your parents see

Several changes arrive together, slowly enough that most people only notice them when they start holding their phone at arm’s length.

The lens of the eye stiffens, so it can no longer change shape to focus up close. This is presbyopia. It usually shows itself between 40 and 45¹, and by 60 nearly everyone has it, and it is worse in dim light.

The pupil gets smaller and the lens turns slowly yellow, so less light reaches the retina, about a third as much at 60 as at 20. Fine contrast is harder to see, and the eyes take longer to adjust to the dark, a little more with every decade. Cataracts cloud the lens further: by 80, more than half of Americans have one or have had one removed, and they make lights seem too bright and colours look faded⁷.

In 2015, about 1.8 billion people² had presbyopia, and 826 million could not see well up close because they had no glasses, or not good enough ones.

The world is getting older. By 2030, one person in six⁴ will be over 60, and by 2050 the number of people over 80 will have tripled. Older people are online, too: in the United States, nine in ten⁸ people over 65 use the internet.

What happens when the web is not built for them is recorded plainly. In one study, people over 65 were 43% slower than younger adults and succeeded far less often, and when they failed they blamed themselves¹¹ 90% of the time. In Britain, nearly a third of over-60s told Age UK in 2025 that life had become harder because services had moved online.

The web’s best-known accessibility number was worked out for the eyesight of a typical eighty-year-old.

Older office standards asked for a contrast of at least 3 to 1 between text and its background. People with 20/40 vision, which the W3C notes⁹ is commonly reported as typical at about 80, lose about one and a half times their sensitivity to contrast. Three times one and a half is 4.5, the minimum for body text in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It is a floor, worked out for people at the edge, not a target.

This tool changes the pixels you see, so it works on anything in a browser: a live site, a Figma prototype link, a Penpot or Sketch prototype, a Storybook story or a generated app.

Open the prototype, click the bookmark, and click through it. The earlier you catch a problem, the cheaper it is to fix.