[blindkid] Low Vision Clinic

[Richard Holloway]

As you already suggest with your email, if you decide to rely on vision as her primary reading mechanism and her vision situation changes or her reading demands overwhelm her visual reading ability when she's older it is going to be a lot harder to bring her braille-reading up to speed.

As I understand it, its much more likely to become a really fast braille reader when you start young, so I'd get her reading braille as well as possible as early as possible and consider her print reading  option as a very nice bonus. Most of the eye doctors I know of are focused on fixing vision so people can do things visually. That makes some sense, but they're generally not all that aware of a great many details about non-visual learning and skills, so figure their advice is probably going to be biased towards possibly over-relying on visual skills when they feel that functional vision is available.

There's nothing wrong with following what sounds like you instinctively want to do and making braille more of a focus. Other things to start on? What have you decided about O&M? That's probably the other key area. You may not want her focused on straining her vision to find her way around when a simple cane in her hand could be giving her a lot of additional information about her surroundings. Some older kids don't like to start using canes while many young kids who use canes from early on are much less likely to resist using one when they're older as well, so there's anther reason to start that early.

Richard




On Sep 14, 2010, at 11:06 AM, elizaellett at yahoo.com wrote:

> Hello,
> So we just went to our daughter's first low vision clinic appt and I'm not surprised by the results, but I am a little confused about a few things. First off she tested at 20/300, we'll take that, she's only 2yrs old, and they said she could possibly make it up to 20/200-20/100!!!! Briefly about Miranda, she is a very stubborn, determined, humorous, and devilishly adorable little girl. She was born with cong cataracts, aniridia, foveal hypo, optic disc abnormalities, optic nerve colobomas, mild microapthalmia, and is moderate to severely deaf in both ears. So her pressures have been fluctuating a bit the last year, we're waiting to see what is going on there before placing her IOLs and helping on her pretty severe esotropia. What then though? We're trying to teach ASL and  spoken language, we're still on the fence about a cochlear implant. The next ABR will make it easier for us to decide on what path to take.  I guess back to the real question, the optometrist stated she's pretty visual, so she will definitely be a print reader and if I want to back her up with braille I could. I've always planned on her reading print, but I planned on her reading majority braille, am I wrong here? I know the difficulties associated with aniridia, I don't want her being 18 and her pressures high, possible corneal opacification and who knows what else and teaching her braille then.  I would love any ideas and thoughts, what else at this age I should be starting her on. 
> Thank you for letting me put my thoughts down, my mind races A LOT!-)
> Eliza
> Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile
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