Solution is actually quite easy.
Lens strength in glasses actually determines where your relaxed eye focuses.
In our youth, out eyes had a relaxed focus at infinity, and we could exert the ciliary muscle in out eye to draw the focus near. As we get older, the lens get hard, and that adjustment capability is lost. However the optimal focal point we used to adjust our eyes to can be re-established if we only know where to focus, and what lens gets us there.
As it turns out, this is a common problem for photographers, and they have a solution. If you are trying to take a picture of a person, and also want the mountains behind them in focus, you need to do two things:
1. You want a big depth of field. This is accomplished by using a small aperture (ie smaller than your pupil), as was described by cutting a hole in a business card. THere are other commercial systems for getting small apertures, I give people small aluminum foil stickers that I drill.
2. You want to adjust your lens to focus BETWEEN the person and the mountains, so the person is inside the near edge of your depth of field, while the mountains are in the far edge of the depth of field. This in-between distance is called the hyperfocal distance, and you can google it if you want the gory math. But the bottom line answer is that you want a +0.75 lens added to your distance prescription for shooting pistol. If you don't need glasses for distance, just use a +0.75. This lens will bring your focus in far enough to get a clear front sight, without coming in so close that the target is too blurry. Off the shelf readers usually do not work, because the lowest power they come in is +1.25, which is much too strong. It will pull in your focus so close that you will see a FANTASTIC front sight, but it will be in so close that the target is gone.
Most eye doctors know this concept, but the need to focus between objects is outside the context of most human vision, so they will often not jump to this solution unless you prompt them that you want to focus at the hyperfocal distance of the front sight.
Also, do not use progressive lenses. Your apparent elevation in shooting is a finction of your focal point. Since progressives have varying focal points, any slight shift in head position, or glasses position on your head will cause you to string your shot groups vertically - it'll drive you batty.
In the interest of full transparency, I sell safety glasses with a +0.75 diopter built in, exactly because my eyes went, so I pulled out my old photography books and went through the theoretical lens math. And it works. Unfortunately, I'm out of stock for the moment, but if you are going to your eye doc for a solution, you can just tell him you want a +0.75 ADD ('add is the medical term for lens power above your distance correction), in a single power lens.
If you want to be really cheap, you can order glasses on-line, just take the first value in your prescrription and increase it by +0.75.
Art Neergaard
ShootingSight LLC
shootingsight@nuvox.net
www.shootingsight.com