Children with Impaired Vision

Our visual acuity is natural until we realize that the eyes don't start getting wet, they become more and more tired and the images we have seen clearly begin to grow dim. The importance of vision is exceptional in everybody's life. We experience 90% - 95% of our surrounding world through vision.

When we talk about low vision, we have to imagine the condition when a person's vision cannot be totally corrected with medical help, eyeglasses or contact lenses, and for this reason, everyday activities such as reading and writing can't be performed without some difficulty.

Such vision difficulties are much more common in the older generation, but it can affect children as a result of illnesses like retinopathy, glaucoma, macular degeneration or cataracts.

When affecting children, the limited visual perception could result in distorted cognition which may obstruct the precise development of basic notions about the world around us.

The most important issue for the children with visual impairment is to find effective ways to accomplish their routine daily tasks like cleaning, eating and dressing, live an independent life, travel, enjoy outdoor activities and have equal chances for a good career.

All these tasks now can be achieved with the help of specially trained people such as specialists in mobility and vision and therapists in vision rehabilitation who can teach these children how to live a normal life.

One important message for children with impaired vision is that technology is bringing about major improvements in living standards not just for those people with normal vision, but also for people who are blind or visually impaired.

Until now books, newspapers, signs were a largely closed off notion to people with little or no sight at all. Computer technology is now able to help people with such things.

The world's first optical character recognition reading system, the Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader, was released on July 1, 2006. This innovative new device combines a digital camera and a personal digital assistant to capture the image of printed text and translate it into synthetic speech.

The other brilliant invention is the Sendero GPS basically an ingenious system whereby the GPS talks to the user. It helps a blind person who is walking in a familiar or unfamiliar location to identify streets, intersections and 50 other categories of orientation landmarks, including restaurants, shops, ATM machines, schools, parks, zoos and other buildings.

It also tells you the direction in which you are heading and the directions to take to get to a specific address as well as providing information on the actual city you are in. In either case, it can tell you how far you have traveled or, how much you have until you reached your destination.
These two brilliant talking machines are really a great step in the right direction for visually impaired people of all ages.

More Children's Shops, Services and Products