Vision disabilities and instruction Vision may be the most important sense for interpreting the world around us. When sight is impaired, it can have a detrimental effect on a child's physical, neurological, and emotional development. Visual efficiency also must be considered. A child who has a visual loss and myopia, for example, has more limited functional vision than a child with visual loss alone. In childhood, the causes of blindness are many and varied.
Blindness can be an isolated disability or part of a condition involving multiple disabilities.
About half of children who are totally blind have other developmental disabilities. Even with normal intelligence, a child who is blind from birth or early childhood is developmentally delayed. However, if visual loss is identified early, various methods of treatment and education improve developmental outcomes. What the Kennedy Center is doing Retinal detachment repair with the free electron laser Vivien Casagrande Loss of vision due to eye trauma affects 2.4 million young people under 30 each year, and traumatic ocular injury is the leading cause of blindness in that age group. Karen Joos, assistant professor of ophthalmology at Vanderbilt, Jim Shen, research instructor in ophthalmology at the Vanderbilt Eye Center, and Vivien Casagrande are collaborating on projects designed to determine if the FEL can improve ophthalmic surgical techniques to save eyes following trauma and to better understand the ocular cellular biology during wound healing.