Getting Help, Taking Action

For people with vision loss: Professionals who work for the Wisconsin Office for the Blind and Visually Impaired are trained as rehabilitation teachers and orientation and mobility instructors. Besides teaching Braille, they know many strategies and adaptations that make life easier when vision loss occurs. Strategies range from marking the stove and oven with raised dots to gaining travel skills for both familiar and unfamiliar environments. Rehabilitation professionals teach with compassion and commitment.

With appropriate rehabilitation services, people can learn to compensate for vision loss, and they often have the opportunity to meet with others who are visually impaired. Knowing that someone cares about their loss, that vision rehabilitation professionals can help, and that other people have used these techniques with success often eases the emotional impact of vision loss.

For people who work on behalf of those with vision loss: While the Wisconsin Office for the Blind and Visually Impaired provides an array of rehabilitation services, there are other services in the community to help people with vision impairments. Providing better lighting, putting materials in larger print, and developing tactile techniques all help make vision loss less frustrating. Generally the strategies and presentations that make life easier for people with vision impairments make life easier for everyone. For example, publications and environments can be visually attractive and still have good color contrast. Clean floors do not always have to be so shiny that they create glare. The Wisconsin Office for the Blind and Visually Impaired can help people with vision act as sighted guides for those who have low vision.

For Policy Makers: Vision loss is complicated. People who lose vision generally have overall poorer health than people without vision loss. They may have more frequent falls, broken hips and other injuries than people without vision loss. In many respects, vision loss is as much a public health issue as it is a rehabilitation concern. The loss of vision requires a variety of supports, including vision rehabilitation. For Wisconsin, these services must be able to respond to the needs of nearly 100,000 older people, along with vision-impaired younger people.

Our population is aging, and with aging comes greater likelihood of vision loss. The number of visually impaired older people will grow substantially in the coming decades. Medical care can do much to prevent blindness and vision loss, but in many cases medical science cannot restore sight. Therefore, rehabilitation services and changes in the environment (better public transportation, materials in large print, etc.) will be needed to create and sustain independence.

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Last Revised: October 24, 2008