Visual Dysfunction As RD & LD

Introduction

There are may ways our vision can get in the way of reading. Not everyone who has a reading or learning disability has troubled vision, but everyone whose vision is significantly impaired or labored will have their reading impacted accordingly. Errors in visual signal acquisition (vsa) or visual signal processing (vsp) can occur for a great many reasons, but they all can be generally summarized as follows (some may argue the finer points, but you’ll get the idea):

• • Extraocular muscle trouble. Each eye is surrounded by six small and high-performance muscles acting as a servo mechanism to direct the eye alone, and then with it’s twin, to exactly where the brain tells it to go.
• • Anatomical irregularities. The eye may be partially unable to function due to congenital defects or injury.
• • Disease. The eye is temporarily or permanently partially unable to function due to infectious, degenerative-genetic, or autoimmune disease.
• • Accommodative disorders. That is, problems with acquiring and maintaining good focus on a target, or signal. The eye struggles to focus and if it achieves it, it struggles to maintain it.
• • Refractive errors. Myopia, hyperopia, astigmatism, anisometropia, antimetropia, amblyopia.
• • Strabismus and amblyopia. Eye turns inwards, outwards. Single eye, or both.
• • Visual signal processing challenges:
• • Visual Discrimination
• • Visual Memory
• • Spatial Relationships
• • Form Constancy
• • Sequential Memory
• • Figure-Ground
• • Visual Closure
• • Integration problems. SRD/Dyslexia. Phoneme and grapheme, that is symbol, awareness. Dyseidesia. Dysnemkinesia (visual-motor). Does not apply to dysphonesia unless the child is reading text aloud.