Photography and Glasses

I've worn glasses since the age of eight. My eyes are weak (-7.5);and to top it off I have a stigmatism (as opposed to being long or short sighted). Anything beyond a few inches from my face disolves into a blur. By the age of 26 you'd think glasses would have just become routine and not really given a second thought. True enough, throughout the day I don't think about them. They're not a problem. They're invaluable to me.

Things change when it comes to photography. Cameras with viewfinders catering to those with poor eyesight are limited to about +3 diaptor, which is fine when the vast majority of people requiring glasses need only +/-1 perscriptions. This allows them to take their glasses off to use the camera.

For the rest of us the glasses have to stay on. For me the main problem has become one of how the lenses in my glasses are made. I can't comfortably use the view-finder looking straight through the centre of my glasses so I end up looking through them at an angle off-centre. The result of this is simulated in the first of the two images on the left. When I'm taking the photograph I'm seeing an out of focus and often ghosted view through the view-finder. You'll see from the second image that the actual result is fine (and this is my dog Meg posing while I tested out my new Signma 70-300mm f4/5.6 APO DG which I bought last week) however getting there and relying on the beep of the focus confirmation is really frustrating. I wish I could see for myself that what I want to be in focus is in focus before taking the shot.

While it's possible (not that I know where) to get ahold of diaptor filters to fit over the view-finder, I would need a +4.5 on top of the cameras built-in +3 adjustment to enable me to use the camera without glassess. To my knowledge they only go as high as +3 diaptor.

So I'm asking: are there any others out there with poor eye-sight struggling with similar issues?