Young learners with severe visual impairments are restricted in many ways, and psychologists and special needs teachers require information about the nature and extent of the possible educationally handicapping effects. This article, written by Michael Tobin, Emeritus Professor of Special Education within the School of Education at the University…

The report provides preliminary findings of a study on the speed of processing visual information by partially sighted children. Findings revealed considerable variation in performance and suggested that some partially AL sighted children may not be able to cope with the test's time demands. (CL)

Studied were eye coordination and effects of fatigue on vision in the visual and academic functioning of 1049 students in grades 1 through 10. An earlier study (1966) examined the eye coordination of 1152 students in grades 1 through 12. The common Snellen Test of Visual Acuity failed to indicate 42% of students who were diagnosed by other tests…

The study assessed variations in the indoor and outdoor locomotor mobility of 22 low-vision adults, under normal and reduced illumination. Subjects' visual fields and contrast sensitivities accounted for 39 percent of the variation in mobility performance, whereas their visual acuities were not related to mobility performance. (Author/JDD)

Three experiments tested the ability of 11 children (ages 6-10) with low vision to recall black-and-white line drawings. Unlike fully sighted age-matched controls, children with low vision recalled best when left to study pictures without verbal intervention. They also named significantly fewer of the remembered pictures correctly. (Author/PB)

Eighty-eight children (either totally blind or with residual vision) estimated directions between landmarks in a large scale layout of objects. Children experienced the layout either directly by walking around it or indirectly by examining a tactile map. Use of tactile maps considerably facilitated the performance of the blind children. (Author/DB)

A study investigated whether the reading difficulties of 60 Dutch children with low vision were a matter of reduced visual input or a consequence of a lack of orthographic knowledge. Results indicated that reduced visual input was the only cause of the children's lower reading performance. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

Compared was the performance of 30 nonhandicapped controls and 30 partially sighted British children (6-to 10-years-old) without other handicaps on tests of shape and letter recognition, visual perception and visuomotor skill, and spelling or reading accuracy or comprehension. (LH)

This article reports the results of digit-span tests administered to 314 children who were visually impaired. Results found that gender, first language, and educational setting had no effect on the children's scores and that the congenitally totally blind children scored higher than did sighted children, whereas those who had had some sight did…

To investigate whether screen color is an important variable in the prescription of closed circuit television (CCTV) systems, 16 adults with low vision were assessed on reading performance on white, green, and amber screens. When the screen luminance and contrast were equated for each CCTV, subjects' reading performance was unaffected by screen…

To develop a battery of tasks to predict and improve mobility performance, a series of functional vision tasks (texural shearing, degraded images, embedded figures, and parafoveal attention) were generated by a microcomputer. Sixty visually impaired subjects given either computerized task training or real-life training improved their low vision…

This study compared characteristics of adults with visual impairments who were either successful or unsuccessful in retaining jobs in competitive employment settings. Data were obtained from a database of vocational rehabilitation (VR) client cases collected from 1978 to 1986. The final sample included three groups: (1) a noncompetitive group of…