Aid To Vision

Letterboards - Pack #1

2012-03-03T14:47:00.002-08:00

So, here they are - the Letterboards made basing on the Clara Hackett's Better Vision Now book.
Download link: http://www.mediafire.com/file/x7d1qgx7euak6gh/Letterboards_Pack1.zip

Contents of the pack:

Letterboard1_A3.pdf contains 20 letterboards with letters of Letterboard #1 letter sizes and Hand Letter Tiles, each letterboard consists of two A3 pages.
Letterboard1_A4.pdf contains 20 letterboards with letters of Letterboard #1 letter sizes and Hand Letter Tiles, each letterboard consists of four A4 pages.
Letterboard2_A4.pdf contains 20 letterboards with letters of Letterboard #2 letter sizes and Hand Letter Tiles, each letterboard consists of two A4 pages.
Letterboard2_A4_2.pdf contains another 20 letterboards with letters of Letterboard #2 letter sizes.

In total there are 80 letterboards in this pack, all of them are different from each other - there are no two same letterboards there.

There are no page numbers, but having the PDF files it's quite easy to determine to what letterboard a certain page that you have printed belongs. For example for Letterboard1_A3.pdf the 1st and 2nd pages make the 1st letterboard, the 3rd and the 4th make the 2nd one and so on; once you've found the page in the file - you know to what letterboard it belongs.

In Letterboard1_A4.pdf pages from the 1st to the 4th make the 1st letterboard.

The choice of the font was discussed in the previous post. I'm sorry that it took me so long to create this pack and make this post - due to personal issues I didn't have enough time.
If you have any questions - feel free to put them in the comments, I'll gladly answer them.

Later on I'll either post more letterboards or post the application for their creation (but that's in case I finish the application in question).
Also, soon I'll post the Domino Wheel and the Red Shifter.

Work in Progress

2011-09-03T11:16:00.000-07:00

I'm currently making a couple of printable charts from the Clara Hackett's Better Vision Now book. One of them is the Domino Wheel. I have almost completed it and even made a test print some time ago, so all that is left to do now is to fix a couple of small things.

Also I'm working on the Letterboards. Clara Hackett suggests to have the letters placed in the "photo album corners" so their position can be changed when you memorize it. When making letterboards in such a way it takes a lot of time to cut out the letters (you have to cut out 48 letters for the Letterboard #1, 48 for Letterboard #2 and 48 hand letter tiles), it also takes a considerable amount of time to cut out the mentioned above "photo album corners" and in addition to this it will regularly take quite some time to shuffle the letters. It would be much easier just to change the letterboard when you see you've memorized it, or even practice with different letterboards each time. That's why I've decided to make an application that will create different letterboards with letters in random order and put them into a PDF file, so they can be easily printed either at home - if your printer produces deep black color, or at the printing office with a laser (probably color) printer. There won't be any need to print hundreds of letterboards - just print for example five of them and for each practice randomly pick out one of those you have printed.

Well, now I have already written something like 50% of what I have planned for this application. At the current moment it's able to generate letterboards that look like on the picture below.

A letterboard on two A3 pages (there will also be an option to make it on four A4 pages)

I'm using Futura Std Medium font for the letters, because it's the most suitable one of those I could find. It's letters are a little thinner than the ones appearing in the book, but they are the thickest of those I have from the fonts of Futura family.

WhatTheFont results for letters as they are in the book

I'll post the mentioned above charts only when I'm more or less satisfied with how they turn out, so probably it will take quite a while before they will be here. And while you're waiting for these charts, here's a nice cartoon for you (of course in case you haven't seen it elsewhere yet):

Blog updates:
Finally the posts about the Clara Hackett's book and the Countning drill from this book have been updated (so now I don't dislike them as much as before, haha...)

Investigating Clara A. Hackett's Counting drill

2011-04-06T06:24:00.000-07:00

Clara A. Hackett have described in her book Better Vision Now: Improve Your Sight with the Renowned Bates Method a drill that's called Counting. It's principle is to count occurrences of some certain color or similar objects on any scenery (for the record - that's not the full description of the drill; examples of Counting: counting how much times red occurs in the scenery around you, counting people on the street, ...).

This technique appears to be very helpful for me (as well as a lot of other drills from Better Vision Now, but this post is about counting only), and I always wanted to find some similar (or at least partly alike) exercises in W. H. Bates' publications.

If such exercises were described by W. H. Bates, it would be like an approval from Dr. Bates for applying the technique in question.
If such exercises can't be found - it may put this technique under suspicion for being wrong. You can't trust anyone these days, you know...
Kidding. To be serious, if similar exercises can't be found then this drill can be something completely new to the Bates Method introduced by Clara A. Hackett.

So, let the investigation begin!

Here's what I came up with:

When performing counting you constantly shift your gaze (while searching for objects you count) and in this sense it's very similar (I won't say it's the same though) to the Drifting Swing described by William H. Bates.

Drifting Swing - The patient does not think of nor regard anything longer than a fraction of a second

And by not regarding anything longer than a fraction of a second (i.e. constantly shifting your gaze) you prevent yourself from staring. Simply as that. Here's how the Drifting Swing was performed by a Dr. Bates' patient:

One patient was unable to imagine any kind of a swing. He was suffering from pain, mental depression, and imperfect sight for the distance. Reading the newspaper, even with glasses, was impossible. Since nothing he tried gave him any relief, I suggested that he stop trying to see and make no effort to imagine stationary objects to be moving. He practiced this while sitting in my waiting room. He paid no attention to the apparent movement of stationary objects, nor did he look at any object more than a fraction of a second. His vision after that improved from 20/50 to 20/10. He became able to imagine the movement of objects and demonstrated that all his pain and mental depression were caused by a stare or an effort to see all things stationary, when he regarded, remembered or imagined them. He was comfortable when he imagined objects moving or swinging, but very uncomfortable when he made an effort or imagined them to be stationary.

Counting colors quite obviously incorporates picking them, and here's a description of picking colors technique in the Better Eyesight Magazine, November 1920 issue, SQUINT AND AMBLYOPIA: THEIR CURE article:

Permanent relaxation can be obtained by any of the methods used in the cure of errors of refraction, but in the case of young children who do not know their letters these methods have to be modified. Such children can be cured by encouraging them to use their eyes on any small objects that interest them.
....
With a map of the United States a child can begin by picking out all the states of a particular color, and as its sight improves it can pick out the rivers and cities. In drawing maps it can proceed in the same way, beginning with the outlines of countries or states, and with improved vision putting in the details. A paper covered with spots in various colors is another useful thing, as the child gets much amusement and benefit from picking out all the spots of the same color. With improved vision the size of the spots can be reduced and their number increased.

Though this article is concerning the cure of squint and amblyopia, the technique of picking colors is described to being used for achieving relaxation, this means it can be also applied for people with errors of refraction, and not just to those who have the mentioned above squint and amblyopia. And if picking colors is being recommended for kids then it could be applied by older people, because grown-ups are the same kids, just a little taller, you know (in case you don't believe me - here's a picture below).

Summing things up

Counting is very similar to the Drifting Swing introduced by William H. Bates (but, as I mentioned earlier, Counting is most likely not the same as the Drifting Swing), and counting colors in addition includes in itself the technique of picking colors described by William H. Bates. So... I guess, here it is - the approval from Dr. Bates.

RNE chart update: chart in PDF format added to the package

2011-03-28T06:52:00.000-07:00

Here is the updated post (new download link and printing instructions for the chart in PDF format were added).

In case you just want the download link, here it is:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/3uc351a64f6m0n6/RNE_chart_in_docx_and_pdf.zip

This long awaited day has finally come...

2011-03-17T12:58:00.000-07:00

Today is the day when I'm finally holding in my hands the book I have ordered quite some time ago. I expected it to come somewhere near 2015, haha, so it was a bit of a surprise to get to know that the book has already arrived to the post office. Well... wonders happen to those who wait, you know.

Clara Hackett with Lawrence Galton, Better Vision Now: Improve Your Sight with the Renowned Bates Method

Inside front cover - The Domino Wheel

Some page from the book - Letterboard #1

A wonderful book it is, I must say. I have already read it in a russian translation and I liked the book a lot. The translation itself was not of a high quality to be honest and that is why I always wanted to have the original book in english.
By the way, I'm not the only one considering this book so wonderful. Here's a quote from the Visions Of Joy site:

http://www.visionsofjoy.org/books.htm

I'll even repeat it again: one of the best books on vision improvement.

And again: one of the best books on vision improvement.

And once again so there's absolutely no chance for you to miss it:

one of the best books on vision improvement.

RNE chart

2011-03-11T07:00:00.000-08:00

Chart print preview

Formats: DOCX, PDF

Contents of the package:

RNE.docx / .pdf

(the chart itself, 3 pages of A4 size)

RNE hand A4.docx / .pdf

RNE hand A5.docx / .pdf

RNE hand A6.docx / .pdf

RNE hand A5 and A6 on one page.docx / .pdf

(hand charts of A4, A5, A6 paper sizes)

RNE small.docx

(small scales of the chart)

This chart was described by Margaret D. Corbett in her book Quick Guide to Better Vision, 1957. The book contains a description of what letters should be on the chart (it says "Relaxation Normalizes Eye Trouble" if you read it column by column - so it should be easy to memorize whats written there), what height should the letters have and what exercises to do with the chart.

Original chart as it is in the book (from the left) vs my chart

As you may have noticed my chart differs a little from the one in the book (and in my opinion my chart looks better, haha... but that's a very biased opinion, because I have constructed it). Letters on the chart in the book seem to look very alike being printed in Arial Black font, while letters on my chart are in bold Arial.

Printing from .docx files
If you get a warning saying something like "The margins of section 1 are set outside the printable area of the page..." while trying to print some of the files from the package - just check whether no clipping occurs on the print preview, and then print the file fearlessly ignoring this warning.

Printing from .pdf files

Please make sure that you print the charts without page scaling.

Here's how printing options should look like

If the Page Scaling option is set to Fit to Paper the letter sizes will be reduced due to page scaling that will eventually occur in this case, and that is quite undesirable.

Usage
I assume, that this charts' usage is not limited to the exercises described in Margaret D. Corbett's book, but it also can be used instead of a Snellen test card in excercises that involve using such a test card, including excercises described by William H. Bates.

Hand charts

I have included hand versions of the chart in the package, they are in different sizes, so you can pick the one (or a few) you would like (in case you're not familiar with how A5 and A6 look like - here is where you can see what sizes these pages have). In case you want to have a hand chart in very small print - you can construct it using the small scales of RNE chart in RNE small.docx.

Download
http://www.mediafire.com/file/3uc351a64f6m0n6/RNE_chart_in_docx_and_pdf.zip