Can the impact of childhood vision impairment be determined?

It is accepted that children with vision impairment should be supported for any functional impact experienced as a result of their eye and vision condition/s. Approaches to assessment for this support should then also focus on identifying functional impact. However, it is common practice that children in Australia are assessed in clinical environments that do not adequately reflect a child's everyday functional performance. This potentially creates a mismatch between the outcome of assessment and the identification of a child's functional needs.
This presentation will discuss the outcome of a preliminary trial that investigated VIS-Ability - a new approach to identifying behaviours that indicate the functional impact of childhood vision impairment. Twelve children with vision impairment and no additional disabilities consented to participate in the VIS-Ability preliminary trial. All participants completed VIS-Ability and an aggregated result was then compared to the child's performance on a validated, self-reported questionnaire named the Functional Vision Questionnaire for Children and Young People, (36 items). The outcome of this comparison will be discussed in this presentation.