Visual Intake Skills

A functional vision assessment must include the following tests:

Measurement of acuities and refractive error:  Blurred sight can affect reading, copying from the board, and the effort required to focus on the image can cause significant eye strain. Glasses, contact lenses, and/or eye exercises can improve the clarity of sight.

Eye health:  It is critical to diagnose eye conditions as early as possible. It is recommended that children receive their first baseline eye exam between 6 mos-1 year of age. Conditions such as amblyopia (lazy eye) are much more easily treated before the age of seven years.

Color Vision:  Color vision problems can affect a student’s ability to interpret maps or perform color coding tasks.

Tracking eye movement skills:  Poor tracking can affect a student’s ability to maintain his/her place when reading and copying from the board. Poor tracking eye movement skills can also affect one’s gross motor (eye-hand, eye-body) skills.

Eye teaming:  Poor eye teaming skills can cause headaches, double vision, eye strain, and reduced tracking.

Near to far focusing skills:  Difficulties shifting the focus of the eyes from far to near and vice versa can cause one to have difficulty copying from the board to the paper. Students can also have difficulty maintaining clear and comfortable vision when doing prolonged near work.