Rapid assessment of functional vision skills for communication and access to AAC

Description

Background - In order to use ‘looking’ for communication and access to AAC systems, children need effective functional vision skills. These core skills include the ability to fix, disengage, and transfer gaze, and to track moving objects. This skill set develops rapidly in infancy so that by 12 months neuro-typical children can demonstrate these abilities consistently. We know that children with severe motor disability who rely on ‘looking’ for communication are vulnerable to a range of problems with vision. We know also that when assessments of functional vision skills are carried out by specialist services, professionals working in nurseries and schools can struggle interpret the results and understand their implications for classroom practice.
In this session we will present a new functional vision skills screening tool, designed to be used by professionals who are not vision specialists. The aim of the tool is to identify children who are at risk of functional vision problems.

Method - The screening tool is comprised of a brief parent questionnaire and a short set of behavioural observation scenarios that can be conducted by people who are not vision specialists. To date, the screening tool has been carried out with 50 children with cerebral palsy affecting their whole body and who have little or no functional speech. We have also carried out full assessments of these children’s visual functioning (e.g. visual acuity, ocular-motor function), and language and learning ability.
The robustness of the procedure is being tested via analyses of inter-rater and test retest reliability, and sensitivity and specificity.

Results - Early analysis indicates that the procedure shows excellent levels of reliability and discriminates effectively between children with and without functional vision problems.

Conclusion - This simple procedure has excellent potential to aid professionals who are not vision specialists to identify children at risk of functional vision difficulties.

Period	11 Sept 2017
Event title	Communication Matters : CM2017 National AAC Conference
Event type	Conference
Location	Leeds, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	National