As a peripatetic QTVI, a huge part of my role is to support and advise schools for children and young people with mild and moderate vision impairments, I do not work regularly with this students and may only see them from once to 6 times a year. This can be challenging in itself, to ensure that the provision for these students is in place to meet their needs and that it is fulfilled when I am not present.
These reasonable adjustments might be anything from providing enlarged print materials, use of assistive technology for typing or screen mirroring and magnifying work, to ensuring the correct lighting and environment for the student with a vision impairment (VI). These small adjustments can make a big difference and can be the difference between pass and fail on an exam.
Quite often, without intention, the advice and recommendations are not consistently carried out, especially if the student 'appears' to cope in the classroom. Teachers can be overwhelmed with planning, preparation, marking, assessments as well as other responsibilities and the small adjustments can get forgotten but this has a huge negative impact for the VI student.
Today, Guide Dogs in collaboration with NatSIP have released a fantastic document to support vision impaired students in England, Wales and Scotland. This guidance stresses the duty of schools and the importance of reasonable adjustments for VI students which also gives some practical advice for settings.
From my experience, the VI students really like it when the adjustments are consistently put in place and feel valued and that their learning and success is as important as their sighted peers.
So, my message to settings is please hold on to the fact that for VI students - which are a low incidence, high need group - that small adjustments make a huge difference.
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