An individual’s capacity to see and ways to measure, protect, and assist vision vary.
A buggy or horseback rider in 1770 had no billboards or road signs to read. Before the beginning of free public schools in the 1840s, few people could read well, books other than the Bible were rare, and newspapers were scarce. How or if a person used words was not a universal measure of one’s worth. Standards of vision or reading comprehension were not relevant for many kinds of work and activities.
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Studio portrait of a woman standing at the gate in a fake stone wall, wearing ankle-length dress and tinted lenses
This head and shoulders portrait photo depicts a man with a floppy mustache, wearing a suit and tinted lenses.
People sensitive to light wore tinted lenses. These examples illustrate popular designs such as the pince-nez that clasped the bridge of the nose and ones with hinges so that a clear lens was available behind the tinted one.
Pair of dark blue pince-nez lenses with soft chamois nose pads and ring for attaching a chain
Until the mid-1800s and the introduction of Snellen's familiar eye chart with letters of various sizes, spectacles were fitted by trying on lenses until the person found ones that worked.