“(CVI) results from when there’s any kind of a brain injury,” Farrell said. “They might have good vision when their eyes are examined, but they don’t know how to use that vision,” she explained. Because a child’s eyes aren’t the issue, CVI can go undetected or misdiagnosed. The health unit said there are 12 known cases of CVI in Northern Ontario. Monday’s workshop dealt with strategies to detect and deal with CVI.
“This was an opportunity for early childhood educators, resource teachers, speech therapists, occupational therapists who are working with children who have cortical visual impairment to learn some strategies to help them use the vision they have,” Farrell said.
“It involves a lot of strategies, like de-cluttering their environment so they can focus on what they’re seeing,” she said.
“Moving the object slightly so they can see it, because it may look like they can’t see, but in reality they just can’t decode all this. There’s too much stimulation in the environment.”
CVI has only been recognized since the 1980s, said Lindsay Hillier, program director with the Ontario Foundation of Visually Impaired Children, who conducted the workshop on Monday.“These children are very environmentally dependent,” said Hillier.
“If it’s a really loud, noisy, visually stimulating environment, these kids may just shut down and not use their vision,’’ she said.
“So if we lower some of the noise in the room . . . as well as using solid-colour placemats to present objects, making sure that there’s not a lot of movement happening around the child because they’ll be distracted by the movement of other people and objects. . . .We look at, really, just making the environment for learning to be calm, solid, quiet.”
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