Eyeglass Prescription - Amount of Refractive Error and Degree of Blur

Amount of Refractive Error and Degree of Blur

The leftmost image above shows a Snellen eye chart as it might be seen by a person who needs no correction, or by a person who is wearing eyeglasses or contacts that properly correct any refractive errors he or she has.

The images labelled 1D, 2D, and 3D give a very rough impression of the degree of blur that might be seen by someone who has one, two, or three diopters of refractive error. For example, a nearsighted person who needs a −2.0 diopter corrective lens will see something like the 2D image when viewing a standard eye chart at the standard 20-foot distance without glasses.

A very rough rule of thumb is that there is a loss of about one line on an eye chart for each additional 0.25 to 0.5 diopters of refractive error.

The top letter on many eye charts represents 20/200 vision. This is the boundary for legal blindness; the US Social Security administration, for example, states that "we consider you to be legally blind if your vision cannot be corrected to better than 20/200 in your better eye." Note that the definition of legal blindness is based on corrected vision (vision when wearing glasses or contacts). It's not at all unusual for people to have uncorrected vision that's worse than 20/200.