How to tailor your site for people with poor vision

We’re not getting any younger. Literally. Between 1985 and 2010, the number of people in the UK who were 65 and older increased by 20% to 10.3 million according to the Office for National Statistics. The percentage of under-16s fell. The Fight for Sight organisation estimates that a third of people over 65 have “difficulties with their eyesight”, while the RNIB puts the number of people who start to lose their sight in the UK at 100 every day. I myself was recently diagnosed as suffering from wet macular degeneration, making me just one of half a million people in the UK with the eyesight-warping condition, for which there’s no cure. Combine the ageing but IT-savvy population with the statistical chance of visual impairment, and the consequences of the way in which websites and apps are coded start to become apparent.