Aries Arditi
Aries Arditi, Ph.D. is Founder and Principal Scientist at Visibility Metrics LLC. Formerly holding positions including Director of Vision Research, Vice President for Vision Science and most recently Senior Fellow in Vision Science at Lighthouse International, with a two year intervening tenure as a Research Staff Member at IBM TJ Watson Research Center, he has authored over 150 scientific publications. His research interests include basic visual psychophysics; visual accessibility of the built environment, computers and internet; text legibility; color and low vision; reading and low vision; assessment of vision function; wayfinding; binocular vision; functional perimetry, and prosthetic vision. His contributions include seminal work in the analysis of visual field defects in binocular visual space (volume perimetry); the first published studies of the independent impact of font parameters on legibility, and numerous studies on the psychophysics of reading and of functional assessment of vision. He is the developer of the Mars Contrast Sensitivity Tests used throughout the world; and of LowBrowse, a unique, open source add-on to the Mozilla Firefox browser that makes it easier for visually impaired people to access the Web. Dr. Arditi has served as Secretary (six years) and President of the International Society of Low Vision Research and Rehabilitation (an additional six years), as Editor-in-Chief of the Informa Healthcare journal Visual Impairment Research (10 years), and on numerous government panels and committees including the National Eye Institute’s Visual Impairment and its Rehabilitation panel which help write the NEI’s 5-year plan (two terms). He is a Research Diplomate and Fellow of the American Academy of Optometry, a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and a member of Sigma Xi.
In addition to his published research, for over fifteen years, Dr. Arditi has been conducting forensic investigations of issues relating to visibility, legibility and vision disability. He has served as an expert in dozens of legal cases, and has been retained as both plaintiff expert and defense expert, to critically analyze and report on human vision issues. He has handled major railway and vehicle accident cases, intellectual property suits pertaining to legibility, and class actions pertaining to vision loss and disability rights.