Many normal, age-related problems affecting vision can be addressed with practical solutions, such as extra lighting for reading recipes or tinkering with garage projects.

In fact, after about age 60, you may find you need additional illumination for most tasks performed indoors or in darker conditions outdoors. This is because your eye’s pupil no longer opens as widely as it once did to allow light to enter. Because less light is reaching your retina where vision processing occurs, images are no longer as sharp as they once were.

To help offset this problem, you might consider extra steps such as:

• Installing task lighting underneath kitchen cabinets or above stoves to help illuminate darker corners.
• Making sure you have enough lighting to brighten work surfaces in your garage, sewing room or other areas where you need to see fine details.
• Asking your employer to install additional lighting, if needed, at your work space.

Also, make sure you have regular eye exams that include critical tests for older eyes to rule out potentially serious age-related eye diseases that may affect vision quality. Your eye doctor also can advise you about the best vision correction options to reduce the effects of normal age-related declines in near vision, color vision and contrast sensitivity.

Cataracts, which are very common in the over-60 age group, also can cause cloudy or hazy vision. Cataracts usually are easily remedied with surgery that removes the eye’s cloudy lens and replaces it with an artificial one.