Limitations include acquiring information as well as independent mobility and self-care. Most of these limitations can be overcome, but it requires some adaptive strategies to do so. At all levels of development, it is necessary to provide interpretation of events and to help the visually impaired child learn alternative methods of acquiring knowledge. Most developmental assessments for young children have many items which visually impaired children fail because they are vision dependent.
Object permanence is a good example.
Infants with normal vision can coordinate eyes and hands to reach out and grasp an object they can see at about 4-5 months. Blind infants usually develop ear-hand coordination to reach out and grasp the same toy at about 12 months, although with intervention, it may happen earlier. Sometimes it is important to differentiate between the specific task or example and the skill it represents. Sighted infants learn to pull a pillow or towel to get a toy resting on it somewhere between 8 and 16 months. The OR Project contains some items in the Cognitive section which are not found in most developmental assessments, but are critical skills for the young visually impaired child such as the body image and spatial concepts found from 3-4 years and up.