Visual Disabilities

Millions of people are inflicted by one or the other type of disability and visual disabilities is one of them which are most commonly found around the world. Visualdisability is classified into two categories such as blindness and low vision. Blindness refers to complete loss of sight caused either due to injury or by disease of retina or cornea, by lesions of optic nerve or brain and by the pathological changes which arise in systemic disorders. The most common causes of visual disability are disease and malnutrition.

The people with low vision are generally print users and need some special materials and equipments. The extent on which visual disability depends is the age of the people at the beginning of vision disability, physical sensory disability of the eyes of the people and the way in which the disability occurred.

There are various factors which influence the vision and they are light glare, inappropriate lighting and fatigue. The main difficulties faced by the children with vision disability is that they are continuously exposed to class schedules, textbooks, writing, class outlines etc but due to this disability, they are unable to get the education. They also cannot watch various visual materials such as laser disks, films, computers and television due to visual disability.

So, to overcome this problem they need unique and individual strategies which are based on the children’s communication skills and particular visual disability. The various assistive technologies are used in teaching the children and they are:-

Braille Printer

It is a kind of decorator that prints in Braille. Some of these printers include Juliet, VersaPoint and Blazer.

Scanner

These can be used along with the screen readers, voice input devices and screen magnifiers. With the help of scanners, printed materials can be used and easily understandable by the children.

Closed Circuit Television

It is a type of model which can be enlarged and printed materials can be seen on the television screen.

MegaDots and Duxbury Braille Translator

These are the software programs which can be used for input and text can be translated very easily. With the help of MegaDots, the printed text can be accessed through the use of a scanner.

Treatments of Visual Disabilities

There are various therapies given to the people with visual disabilities and vision therapy is one of them. This is a set of treatment programs which is given to improve their visual comfort and health. Orthoptics is one of the forms of vision therapy which is mostly used to treat binocular vision disorders like strabismus, amblyopia and double vision. This therapy is also used in treating the people having difficulties in concentration and visual attention.