Nowadays the term “visual handicap” is understood to mean more than the complete or rapidly increasing loss of vision, a reduction of the field of vision or legal blindness. Additionally, cerebral and neurological disturbances which lead to a visual handicap, such as eye movement disturbances and psychosomatic causes, must also be considered.
In industrial countries the most common cause for a visual handicap in childhood is a congenital visual disturbance and less often, an acquired reduction of vision. The number of visual handicaps resulting from an organic eye disease or underdevelopment has decreased during the last few years. However, the number of neurologically caused visual handicaps where the eye itself is healthy, has risen sharply in recent years. 

What can be done upon receiving the diagnosis, “visually handicapped”?

Confronting parents of a child with such a shattering fact is a very difficult task for the doctor and requires much sensitivity and empathy. It is especially important to be considerate of the feelings and fears of the child as well as those of the parents, and to encourage both parties to get further treatment and support from specialists and other help organisations.   

What support and aid possibilities are there?

The parents take on a very important, if not the most important role in support for visually handicapped or even blind children. The mother and father take over the main part of caring for the child and therefore must absolutely be included as active participants in the support of their child. Because visually handicapped and blind children do not learn many things on their own as quickly and automatically as “healthy” children, they not only have to be supported in healthy measures, but they must also be challenged. In most cases too much pity and over-protection are out of place. Visually handicapped children may sometimes be slower and more impatient in their development than children who can see, but this is because they are not aware of a large part of their surroundings. It is therefore especially important for parents and caregivers to be resourceful in arousing the child’s curiosity and initiative for new experiences. Along with this, parents of handicapped and blind children also have to learn to understand and correctly interpret the child’s body language, because in many situations, this can differ from that of seeing people.

The earlier in childhood visually handicapped children are encouraged to use and facilitate their (remaining) eyesight, the bigger the chance in many cases that the child can later develop viable vision. Although “learning to see and perceive” is a lifelong process, the building blocks are learned in early childhood, or proverbially put, “a tree must be bent while it is young.”

Numerous schools for eye training, mobile early intervention sites, self-help groups, associations and special pedagogic establishments in Austria offer professional aid in the care giving and facilitation of visually handicapped and blind children. The support of specialists within the framework of therapy and teaching practical life skills can enable many visually handicapped and blind persons to integrate into society as well as to find a profession as part of a fairly normal life.

Resources such as magnifying seeing aids, reading computers, Braille, acoustic streetlights, stair markings, orientation and mobility training, seeing-eye dogs, acquiring technical aids for housework, trainers for learning practical life skills and above all the mobile early intervention in early childhood, can contribute to the visually handicapped or blind person’s ability to live as self-reliantly as possible.