Dim Lights?

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I've been reading about the National Autistic Society's "Autism Hour" campaign and I can't help but notice they make a big to do about having shops dim their lighting.

Why is this, and where is the consideration for aspies (etc) who have bad eye sight?

I went in my local Tesco recently and they have rather pleasant, well diffused LED lights, as well as natural light coming in from the roof and windows. Fairly typical for a modern supermarket. If the lighting levels in there were much dimmer, I would have trouble seeing where I am going and wouldn't be able to read product labels etc.

Good question. Overly bright lights can be uncomfortable, but I've never been in a public place yet where the lights were so bright that I brought my hands to my eyes to shield them.

Sound for me is far more hyper sensitive than sight. It's a regular occurrence where sounds in daily life, noise pollution, loud vehicles, etc are such that I have to cover my ears. If I was aware of an establishment that I knew to be too loud, I would absolutely avoid such a place completely.

The lights at a nearby Ocean State Job lot is bright enough for plants to grow normally!

Personally, I like dim lighting in many locations though not because of sensitivity. It can look real homey, and besides it saves energy.

I've poor eyesight, so brightness helps. Though if I'm not looking at/for something, I'm content with low light, darkness.

I understand it though, awareness and all.

Under bright florescent lights I have trouble reading, as all the colors get blurred together. It causes a ton of fatigue to be under such lights, and can cause confusion as well as pain.

I wear sun glasses and a hat most of the time to reduce it, but it doesn't help all the way. So I like the effort personally.

i don't like dim light, can't see well, can't read in it
so now im cured

too much flickering isn't funny, but the muzak in the aisles where you need to think is driving me bonkers
sarc/:
but shopping is on its way out, every week i can't find half of my shopping list, in the summer there's nothing to drink, then there's no washing products (only the most expensive) or no bread, or no bread and no milk & so on
is it the marriage-trick again? when no one wants to marry any more make it gay, when no one wants to shop no more make it disabled, the enormous growth in disabled parking space was the precurser of it?

I have a rare low vision disorder that includes sensitivity to lighting conditions & I see better in lower light.

I sometimes have sensory issues to bright lights, sometimes it is worse when I am tired. Sometimes I hate being in a car at night especially when headlights are coming towards me.

I have this Autism Hour advertised. I walk past Sainsbury’s most morning so out of curiosity I will have a look when they do there hour near me.

I think that hypo-sensitivities are often given much less attention than hyper-sensitivities. In some ways this might make sense, as hyper-sensitivities may be more likely to lead to sensory overload and possibly melt-downs, whereas the consequences of hypo-sensitivities are probably less extreme, though still frustrating and possibly disorientating.

While there are certain kinds of light that I struggle with (fluorescents, flickering), I do generally prefer things to be well lit. I have quite strong visual snow most of the time, which the pattern recognition parts of my brain often turns into patterns and perceptions of movement. This makes my low-light vision poor, as I need good light to "see through" the hallucinatory things in my vision - I need a strong signal to overcome my poor signal-to-noise ratio, so to speak. Having said that, when I have a migraine coming on (which are usually only visual), I become very averse to strong light; so even for one particular autistic person, there isn't necessarily a single solution which always works.