Initiation of communication and action

Although not mentioned in the list of the four important functional areas, one more function should be covered. Especially when evaluating severe low vision we should pay attention to whether the lack of visual information about what is going on in the environment leads to a decrease in the initiation of communication and action. This is important to notice so that the child's observation techniques can be developed and peers and family be taught to support participation in all activities.

As we can see from this summary, visual acuity and visual fields do not sufficiently depict vision impairment or disability but together with other measurements of visual function they give us a lot of useful information for understanding the child's visual capabilities and problems in different activities. After this kind of assessment it is possible to choose which techniques the child needs to learn and adopt for different tasks although it is often wise to introduce more than one type of technique for each activity, so that the child has a range of strategies to choose from.

Questionnaire (PDF-file)
The role of vision in the functions of a visually disabled child (PDF-file)

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