Chrissy Cowan Listen to Chrissy Cowan’s advice to professionals on how to help parents teach and reinforce the use of low vision skills.


My name’s Crissy Cowan. I am an Education Specialist with the Education Service Center Region 13 in Austin, Texas.

What do you believe professionals should do to help parents teach and reinforce the use of low vision skills, vision efficiency skills at home, in the school, and the community?

I think that vision teachers, TVIs, professionals, and parents should keep visual acquisition (the skills of visual efficiency) and teaching within the context of the event in which they’re going to naturally occur, and that in the home, school, and community environments.

So for example, while you’re preparing a snack, the parent should learn how to optimize the setting and encourage participation. And everyone needs to remember that modifications will typically not occur outside of the school environment. And so, you can insist that teachers modify instructions and materials, but ultimately, when the child walks out of the school door, the rest of the world will not be modified for them. And that’s why it’s so important for the child to learn to develop the skills to access the environment, and ultimately, they have to be able to compete in the world of work.

So, my advice to the professional working with the parent is to teach the parent how to look at the task that the child is trying to do and have the information about where their vision is performing and then capitalize on that setting to be able to help the child learn how to negotiate the environment.