What can be done about the expiry date on a passport not being very visible?

Question 1

I was travelling with my colleague, and he was held up for a long time at passport control. When I asked him what happened, he said that the officer couldn’t read the expiry date on his passport and had to call another officer to read it.

Looking at the passport, I agree that the expiry date is barely visible, since it is printed on top of some background decoration:

The passport is non-biometric but machine-readable, and is nowhere near the expiry date. What can be done to avoid such issues in future travels?

Question 2

According to the Format section of the Wikipedia page Machine-readable passport, characters 22-27 of the second line of machine-readable text at the bottom of the page contain the expiry date in YYMMDD format:

Positions	Length	Characters	Meaning
1–9	9	alpha+num+<	Passport number
10	1	numeric	Check digit over digits 1–9
11–13	3	alpha+<	Nationality or Citizenship (ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code with modifications)
14–19	6	numeric	Date of birth (YYMMDD)
20	1	numeric	Check digit over digits 14–19
21	1	alpha+<	Sex (M, F or < for male, female or unspecified)
22–27	6	numeric	Expiration date of passport (YYMMDD)
28	1	numeric	Check digit over digits 22–27
29–42	14	alpha+num+<	Personal number (may be used by the issuing country as it desires)
43	1	numeric+<	Check digit over digits 29–42 (may be < or 0 if all characters are <)
44	1	numeric	Check digit over digits 1–10, 14–20, and 22–43

One might think (hope?) a passport officer would be aware of this, but perhaps your colleague can point them to it in future.