AuraScreen
An Accessibility tool for Windows to aid users with eye floaters
AuraScreen is an accessibility suite I was commissioned to build for users dealing with eye floaters. Eye floaters are those drifting dust-particle-like shapes that float across your vision — they’re always there, but on a bright screen or a white background they become genuinely distracting and exhausting to deal with.
The tool goes beyond what Windows’ built-in accessibility options offer. You can apply color filters to your entire screen, or target them at a specific program window — so if one app is the problem, you’re not changing everything else. There’s also a tinted box that tracks your cursor, letting you soften the area around wherever you’re looking.
The Hard Parts
Getting per-application color filtering to work smoothly was the biggest technical challenge. Windows doesn’t have a clean way to render different color treatments on different parts of the screen at the same time, so I had to hook into GPU-level graphics APIs to make it work without tearing or flickering.
The cursor-tracking box had a similar problem. To stay smooth during movement it needs to update thousands of times per second — getting that to run without choppiness required pushing the rendering through hardware-accelerated paths rather than letting Windows handle it at the software level.
Notes
I built an interactive frontend for the project website that let visitors see in real time how the filters affect a simulated screen. The site is down now, but I still have the repo and plan to bring it back as a standalone page here.
AuraScreen hit around 100,000 downloads on the Microsoft Store. The main regret is marketing — I didn’t push it nearly as hard as I should have for something that filled a gap this specific.
