Visual Impairment

• Partnering is the “key” to effective visual impairment instructional strategies. Meeting the academic, social, and functional life skills needs of students with visual impairments demands considerable finesse, goal prioritization and creative problem solving. Creativity is the answer to many questions: in scheduling, in instruction, in use of free time, and in collaboration among the many adults involved in each student’s program. IEP team members must assume responsibility for instruction and practice of newly learned skills when there is a natural open opportunity to do so. Each person must believe in successful acquisition of skills in all curriculum and life skill areas. IDEA requires parents to be members of the IEP team so that they can identify family routines, preferences and their dreams for their child. This is so clear goals and objectives can be developed.

• Visual Impairment

• Classroom Tools for the Visually Impaired

• You can give the student tactile objects to explain concepts.

• Students can count buttons on a tactile (printed out) graph. The means of representation has changed by the expectation of the student has not.

• Alternative assignments that focus on the same skill can be prepared (if it’s impossible to create an adaptation to the general education lesson plan).

• They can use magnification (like glasses, telescopes, magnifying lenses, & large print books).

• Use an abacus for calculating.

• Use assistive technologies like a CCTV, an optical character reader, computer screen enlargement system, a screen reader, a note taking device, and a braille embosser (prints out braille versions of the text).

• Oral or verbal instructions on project objectives and content curriculum lectures.

Damage to the structures involved in the visual process can result from an event that happens during the development of the embryo, or after birth, or at any time during development. Congenital visual impairment occurs at birth, in the case of blindness, before visual memories have been established. Students who acquire vision loss after having unimpaired vision have an adventitious visual impairment. That is an impairment resulting from an advent (i.e. loss of sight caused by hereditary conditions that just began to manifest) or an event (loss of sight by trauma).