Robert Masello used to laugh at his parents when he went out to eat with them. If the restaurant had a menu with pictures, his father would point to any vaguely appealing image. For his farsighted mother, Mr. Masello, in his teens at the time, would hold the menu up from across the table.

Oh, how the tables have turned. Now when Mr. Masello, 54, goes out to restaurants with friends, especially places with lighting that is easy on wrinkles but hard on vision, “it looks like an all-night study group,” said Mr. Masello, a novelist in Santa Monica, Calif. “We’re taking off our glasses and rubbing our eyes, hunching over the menus with puzzled expressions, signaling the waiter for flashlights and candles.”

As baby boomers grope their way through middle age, they are encountering the daily indignities that accompany a downward slide in visual acuity: trying to read a road map in a car at night; cellphones designed for 20-year-old eyes; the minuscule letters on a bottle of aspirin; nutrition information squeezed onto a bag of peanuts.

And unlike their parents and grandparents, they are not shy about expressing their displeasure, in some cases, taking matters into their own hands or prompting some companies to pay attention.