Illegible + Unintelligible = The Same Sandwich

My favorite neighborhood eateries are run by artists. Each establishment offers its own aesthetics through a certain curation of cuisine and atmosphere. There's usually good music playing on the stereo, local work by a roster of painters and printmakers on the walls, and bulletin boards plastered with tons of flyers for community happenings. The food and drink these places present are little works of cheap, culinary art, reliably tasty and satisfyingly filling. And among the art adorning the walls are some bits related to the food, most notably the menu and a mish-mosh of notes tacked onto that menu as addenda. It's truly beautiful. And utterly unreadable to a visually impaired person.

I use "unreadable" as an umbrella term that has two distinct parts. One part is "illegible", meaning that I can't read it because the writing is too far away, or the fort is too irregular, thin, or faded. This is an optical thing, meaning the part of vision that happens in the eye can't distinguish the images being presented to it.

The other half of "unreadable" is "unintelligible", meaning that my I can't process what's going on because having all these add-on notes and things arranged in a nonlinear, scattered fashion makes stuff hard to read, even when the font is legible. This is a cerebral thing, related to the part of vision that happens in the brain not distinguishing the information being presented to it.

Low vision can be a cocktail of optical and cerebral malfunction. People who were once blind and then obtained vision often cannot deal with the brain part of seeing, even though their eyes have been made to work fine.  My situation is less extreme, and I've taken to snapping pictures of menus. I use my phone's screen to magnify each menu item, but then sometimes can't make sense of what I see. Meanwhile, everyone around is ordering, and pretty soon it's my turn.

"What''l you have?"

The same sandwich I had last time.