Vision and Promoting Health

Author(s):  
Marla L. Moon

A visual impairment can affect cognitive, emotional, neurological, and physical development. Visual impairment impairs reading speed and comprehension, and is often mistaken for a learning disability. Learning is accomplished through complex and interrelated processes, one of which is vision. As a result, visual impairments limit the range of experiences and kinds of information to which one is exposed. A reliance on visual cues in health and risk messages intensifies these effects with regard to health information. The millions of children and adults who are affected by visual impairments worldwide thus require specific consideration regarding how best to make health information accessible for them. The reliance on caretakers to address the health information needs of those living with visual impairments violates their privacy and threatens their emotional well-being. Technological and modality advances that rely on touchscreens that lack tactile or auditory cues marginalize a broad segment of society that is in need of gateways to overcome barriers to accommodating visual impairment. In designing strategic health and risk messages, consideration should be given to this scope of possible limitation and its implications for access to and processing of health and risk information. Health and risk message designers should understand both the realities of challenges to accessing information for the visually impaired and strategies for addressing these realities and the scope of the issue worldwide and across the lifespan.

2017 ◽  
Vol 111 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Yuan ◽  
Li-fang Zhang ◽  
Bing Li

Introduction The present research pioneered the effort in assessing adolescents’ coping with visual impairment through adapting the Brief COPE in an eastern context. The first study preliminarily explored the applicability of the Brief COPE to Chinese adolescent students with visual impairments. Based on the results, the Brief COPE was modified and renamed, COPE-Revised. The second study tested the internal psychometric properties and the criterion-related validity of the COPE-Revised. Criterion-related validity was obtained through investigating the correlation between coping and self-esteem. Method The first study involved 176 adolescent students with visual impairments, comprising a survey using the Brief COPE and follow-up interviews. In the second study, another cohort of 170 adolescent students with visual impairments responded to the COPE-Revised together with an inventory assessing self-esteem. Results The COPE-Revised showed adequate psychometric properties. Three higher-order factors, namely self-directed, other-directed, and relinquished-control coping, were identified. The way in which self-esteem was correlated with these three dimensions of coping provided evidence for the criterion-related validity of the COPE-Revised. Discussion The findings indicate that the COPE-Revised has sound psychometric properties among adolescents with visual impairments. Limitations regarding the sample-selection bias and the means of questionnaire survey among visually impaired adolescents are noted. Implications for practitioners This research tailored a coping inventory for educators, counselors, and researchers who are interested in investigating adolescents’ ability to cope with visual impairments. The relationship between coping with visual impairment and self-esteem found in this research has reference significance for educational and counseling services for visually impaired adolescents.


Author(s):  
R. Gnanabai

This chapter describes how health is the most precious component for the happiness and all-round development of human being in the society. Alongside this, information is an important resource for individual growth and survival. Therefore, a Health Information System (HIS) is a system for collecting/processing of data from various sources, and using the information for policy-making and management of health services. This chapter discusses health literacy and its association with health information needs and health information literacy, the status of women in India and their influence in the well-being of the family, and the impact of HIS. This chapter also proves that with enough data obtained from the women of Kanyakumari District in India, the government's policy needs to be directed towards women for the success of its health-care programmes.


Symmetry ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mirza Waqar ◽  
Muhammad Aslam ◽  
Muhammad Farhan

It is often uncomfortable for disabled individuals, especially those with vision impairment, to conduct educational activities in collaboration with people that have perfect vision. This can be because of the former’s lack of confidence, vision capability, and acceptance. Information and communications technology (ICT) has played a vital role in giving support to people with visual impairments so that they can overcome their issues. This study proposes innovative solutions that address the challenges faced by partially or completely visually impaired people. It provides an interactive and intelligent interface, which they may use to perform educational activities, such as editing, writing, or reviewing documents, in collaboration with people without visual impairments. The system provides high-quality awareness features by sending them instant voice notifications about the actions and events occurring in the shared environment. A speech-recognition engine has been integrated into the system to allow users to interact with the application through voice commands. The system is evaluated through experiments, where people with visual impairment and people without visual impairment were engaged in collaborative writing. The obtained results are encouraging. The users showed curiosity in the system and were able to focus on the productive task instead of their disability.


1997 ◽  
Vol 91 (4) ◽  
pp. 401-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. L. Recchia

Infants and young children who are severely visually impaired from birth show consistent delays in concept development, compared to their sighted peers. This article focuses on the impact of severe visual impairment on the development of those play skills that facilitate concept development and discusses the ways in which intervention can enhance play experiences for infants and young children with severe visual impairments.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis Claudio Leite Pereira ◽  
Janine Kniess

Mobility for people with visual impairments is a challenge in placeswhere there is no knowledge of obstacles. Research carried out inthis work identified that people with visual impairment have difficultieswith obstacles located above 1 meter. Thus, an approach isproposed to notify the visually impaired person through sound andvibration about such obstacles. The proposed solution is available onthe ThingSpeak platform and components such as microcontrollers(ESP8266 NodeMcu ESP-12), sensors, buzzer and GPS were usedin its development. Results confirmed that the proposed approachcorrectly identified the existence of obstacles with a height equalto or greater than 1 (one) meter in the way of visually impairedpeople.


Author(s):  
Mahmoud Hamash ◽  
Hasnah Mohamed

the purpose of this study was to examine whether visually impaired students can build educational robots and program them if they receive adapted materials and instructions with guided instruction from well-trained educators in the fields of inclusive STEM Classrooms. Discussion of the technologies and our experimental approach is presented in this paper and validated through the continued successful effort with visually impaired students for two years of the program and specialists in the field of visual impairment and STEAM, we also validated our approach by performing experimental classes for students with different visual impairments and ages. The results indicated that the approach used by BASAER team was successful in enabling the blind and visually impaired students to build and program educational robotics and to participate effectively in national and international STEAM programs and competitions, with some limitations and Challenges encountered and explored during this research. The results from this study will be used to suggest a fully adapted system to support full inclusion for blind and visually impaired students in educational robots in STEAM context and to promote the adoption of this study and similar studies toward Inclusive STEM Classrooms.


2000 ◽  
Vol 94 (4) ◽  
pp. 218-228
Author(s):  
Toshibumi Kakizawa ◽  
Graeme Douglas ◽  
Kunio Kagawa ◽  
Heather Mason

This article reports on a 1995 survey of visually impaired students in Japan: 4,537 in special schools for visually impaired students and 233 in visual impairment units in mainstream schools. Although there appears to be a general decrease in the number of students with visual impairments in Japan, the proportion with additional disabilities is increasing. The findings for Japan are contrasted with those of similar studies in Great Britain.


Author(s):  
Kolawole Akinjide Aramide ◽  
Wasiu Olayide Lawal ◽  
Rachael Opeyemi Odunlade

This study investigated the information needs and library service delivery to students with visual impairment in Oyo State, Nigeria with a focus on assessing the influence of library 1 services; information needs; media formats availability and accessibility on library use among students with visual impairment in Oyo State, Nigeria. The study established educational information, health information and information on coping with their visual impairment as major information needs of the visually impaired students while circulation service, reference service and screen reading service on computers are found to be the only library services provided for them. Print Books/Magazines, Braille Books and Braille-in-Print were found to be prominent among the few media-formats available for the students while the dearth of media-formats was found to be inadequate in meeting the information needs of students with visual impairment in Oyo State. Lack of ease of accessing the library resources, facilities as well as library staff whenever they need help, poor policy on borrowing privileges, lack of path sounders to guide their movement around the library among others were major accessibility issues confronting the students in enjoying quality library services. The study recommended the need to address the provision of basic facilities that are critical to effective library service delivery to the visually impaired students.


2005 ◽  
Vol 99 (8) ◽  
pp. 486-498 ◽  
Author(s):  
Divya Jindal-Snape

A student who is visually impaired was trained to evaluate his social behavior and to recruit feedback from his sighted peers, who were trained by him to provide the feedback. The self-recruitment of feedback improved the student's accuracy in evaluating social skills requiring visual cues. In addition, the peers extended their feedback to other aspects of the social environment than social behavior.


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