Low vision: Apps and online resources

I recently saw a patient in a low vision clinic whose main problem was reading her Bible. As so often is the case, she said the book had tiny print and very thin pages and it was difficult for her to manage even with magnifiers. As is also so often the case, she had not brought the book with her.

She was originally from the Congo and she spoke some French, a little English, though her preferred spoken tongue was the Congolese dialect of Lingala.

As an experiment, I went online and soon found an app (named ‘Bible’ – figure 1) boasting free down loads in a host of languages (over 40 – figure 2). These could be downloaded and read using standard black on white (figure 3), reverse contrast (figure 4) and enlarged as required (figure 5).