Online eye tests

[SueEllen]

Under The Health and Safety(Display Screen Equipment) Regulations 1992 if you spend a significant amount of your working time on a VDU your company is legally obliged to provide a sight test for you and pay towards optical devices needed for your eyes for this work.

There is a long discussion about this somewhere which you can find using search but the crux of the matter is you can:
1. Claim for your sight test as long as the optician makes it clear on the receipt/prescription what the test was for
2. Can claim for the element of glasses needed to do the VDU work. This can be all of it if you are long sighted or part of it if you need bifocals/multifocals.

You can't claim for contact lenses/contact lense tests except in rare circumstances, and if you wear glasses normally then you can't claim for the glasses.

[SueEllen]

They will try to sell you specs at the end but you don't have to buy any and they will also try not to give you your prescription in a written form (as you could go elsewhere then) and I've yet to manage to prise this document out of them successfully. They say 'come back when X is here' or 'we will post it', etc, but nothing ever happens even though they are legally obliged to hand it over..

As I wear contact lenses as well and have had eye tests separate from my contact lense test (see post above) any optician who does this loses more money from me then they gain by not handing it over and being awkward. So in one Boots store the actual optician actually came out to give me the prescription when the shop assistant refused to when I insisted they were legally obliged to.

[KimberleyChris]

Just try the cheap 'supermarket' glasses first. Most people start to get a bit long-sighted as middle age approaches, and need 'reading glasses'. It's just your lenses getting a bit stiffer and the ring of muscles that 'squeeze' them when you try to focus close-up wearing out a bit.

If you can still see perfectly into the distance, but have trouble focussing on something less than, say, a yard away, then a cheap pair of +1.25 or +5 may do the trick. Just try them, they will either work or they won't.

If they don't then see the optician.