About

Your screen, easier to read.

DOA is a Windows desktop application that adjusts what your screen displays so that people who wear glasses can use it comfortably, without putting them on.

What DOA does

Most people who wear glasses can still see their screen without them, just not as clearly as they'd like. Text gets a little soft, fine detail blurs, and long sessions become uncomfortable. DOA addresses this by adjusting your screen display based on your glasses prescription.

You enter your prescription values once. DOA runs in the background and adjusts everything on your display, across every app, browser, document, and video continuously, at up to 60 frames per second.

There is no hardware involved. Nothing is attached to your screen. Everything is processed locally on your device.

The science behind it

The idea of a screen that pre-adjusts its image to compensate for the viewer's eyesight isn't ours. It has been studied in academic research for over a decade. DOA builds on that body of work and applies it as practical, software-only display adjustment.

Where the approach comes from

In 2014, researchers from UC Berkeley and the MIT Media Lab presented "Eyeglasses-free Display" at SIGGRAPH: a display that pre-distorts what it shows based on the viewer's prescription, so the image appears sharp to that viewer without glasses. The concept has since been patented, extended, and built upon by further research.

To be clear about what this means: the strongest results in that research used special light-field display hardware. DOA is software-only. It works on the screen you already own, which means results depend on your screen's resolution and your prescription strength. We'd rather you know that upfront. The research above is independent academic work; the institutions involved are not affiliated with and do not endorse DOA.

That hardware gap is exactly what our roadmap is about: per-user calibration, content-aware adjustment, and, longer term, working with display manufacturers to bring correction closer to what the research achieved in the lab.

Why it gets better over a few days

A lot of people find DOA feels subtly off the first time they use it, and clearer after a few days. That's not your imagination, and it isn't the software changing. It's your visual system adapting.

Your visual cortex constantly recalibrates to whatever you've been looking at. Researchers have measured this directly: in one 2004 study, people with uncorrected near-sightedness improved their reading-chart acuity from roughly 6/35 to 6/20 over just three hours of adaptation, with no change at all in their actual eyesight. The brain simply learned to read the image in front of it. Notably, near-sighted people (DOA's core users) tend to adapt more than people with normal vision.

DOA shows a sharpened, corrected image rather than a blurred one, so it isn't literally the same as adapting to blur, but it relies on the same underlying ability of the brain to settle into a new kind of input. It's why we say give it a few days, and why the difference is most obvious when you toggle it off after using it for a while.

This describes a normal perceptual effect, not a treatment. Adaptation makes the corrected image more comfortable to read; it does not change your prescription or push past the physical limits of your screen. DOA is built for adults and is not intended for children. Sustained exposure to blurred images has been studied in connection with near-sightedness progression in childhood, which is one more reason we keep DOA an adults-only accessibility tool rather than anything aimed at developing eyes.

Who DOA helps

DOA is most useful for everyday screen activity like reading, writing, browsing, and working. Anyone who regularly uses a computer without glasses can benefit.

Reading without glasses

Articles, documents, and emails. Comfortable to read without reaching for your glasses first.

Long work sessions

Working at a screen for hours without your glasses is uncomfortable. DOA keeps your display readable throughout the day.

Reading glasses users

If you need reading glasses for screens, DOA adjusts your display so text is easier to read up close, without reaching for them.

When glasses aren't available

Glasses left in another room, broken, or simply not wanted; DOA keeps your screen usable.

Color difficulty

Color adjustment modes for Protanopia, Deuteranopia, and Tritanopia, for people who have difficulty distinguishing certain colors on screen.

Multiple monitors

Different display settings per screen, useful for mixed setups where monitors are at different viewing distances.

Binocular imbalance

When both eyes don't naturally align on the same point, screens can cause strain or double vision. DOA's prism correction shifts the display to compensate, so both eyes land comfortably on the same image.

What we're working to improve

DOA works, but there are real gaps worth being honest about. Strong prescriptions (beyond around −6D) get less reliable results. Screen resolution becomes the limiting factor at that point, and that ceiling hasn't been fully lifted yet. The calibration is also still generic: your prescription values are a starting point, but your screen distance, ambient light, and the specifics of your eyes all affect the result in ways the current version doesn't account for yet. A personalised calibration system is the biggest single improvement in progress.

Color filters use established correction matrices. They work, but they're not tuned per-person; someone with mild Deuteranopia and someone with a severe case get the same filter applied. An in-app calibration game (Ishihara plate-based) is being built so you can identify your specific deficiency before applying a filter, rather than guessing. And right now DOA still requires a formal glasses prescription to set up, which locks out anyone without easy access to an optometrist. Prescription-free auto-detection is planned specifically for that.

Current status of all of this, in detail: Roadmap →