KINGSTON & NAPANEE
VISION DEVELOPMENT CENTRE
WHAT IS VISION THERAPY?
Vision therapy focuses on developing, improving, and enhancing an individual’s visual performance. It is an individualized treatment program that utilizes advanced techniques and procedures based on the latest neuroscience. Vision therapy can successfully treat a number of visual deficits that affect all areas of life, such as learning, sports, and job performance.
Treatment includes specialized lenses, filters, and instruments to train the eyes and brain to better acquire and process visual information. It involves a combination of in-office sessions, computerized programs, and at-home therapy procedures.
Vision therapy can improve eye alignment, eye movement, eye teaming, depth perception, tracking, visual focusing, eye-hand coordination, and visual information processing. To find out if you or your child may have symptoms of a visual skills disorder, review the symptom checklist below.
Please call or email our office and schedule an appointment to find out if a visual disorder is impacting your performance in work, school, athletics, and other areas of your life.
VISUAL SKILLS
Vision goes far beyond having good eyesight or “20/20” vision. Seeing, understanding, and processing visual information requires over 20 visual skills. Our Visual Skills Assessment thoroughly evaluates each of these skills to find out if any areas may be impacting learning, coordination, and visual performance.
We recommend first having a regular eye exam with your optometrist to ensure the eyes are healthy and seeing well. It is common for routine eye exams to be normal, however it is important to rule out any problems with eye health or eyesight.
To schedule a Visual Skills Assessment, please contact our office directly.
EYE ALIGNMENT
Eye teaming is essential for depth perception, reading, tracking, and coordination. Good eye alignment occurs when both eyes are looking at the same target and focusing together.
Poor eye teaming can result in a wandering eye, double or blurred vision, poor coordination, and/or difficulties concentrating on near tasks.
OCULOMOTOR SKILLS
The six ocular muscles around each eye must work together to accurately control eye movements. This includes pursuits (ability to track moving objects), fixation (ability to consistently gaze at a target), and saccades (ability to accurately look from one object to another).
If oculomotor muscles are ineffective, symptoms include difficulty reading, loss of place, and repeating lines. People with this condition may also have difficulty with balance, depth perception, sports, or hand eye coordination. Virtually every task requires good control of eye movements.
DYNAMIC FOCUSING
Eye focusing involves the ability to quickly and accurately maintain clear vision as objects change distances. This is important when looking from the chalkboard to a paper on the desk and back.
Eye focusing also allows us to easily maintain clear vision over time like when reading a book, writing a report, or driving.
VISUAL-MOTOR COORDINATION
Visual motor integration is the coordination of visual information and fine-motor control. It is the skill that allows us to use our eyes and our hands when copying, drawing, or catching a ball, for example.
Testing and treatment involves bilateral integration, self-awareness skills, midline crossing, primitive reflex integration, and fine and gross motor coordination.
VISUAL PROCESSING
Visual perception refers to the brain’s ability to make sense of what the eyes see. These skills are important for many every day skills such as reading, writing, cutting, drawing, completing puzzles, math, dressing, finding objects on the bedroom floor as well as many other skills.
These skills include visual memory, sensory processing, visual attention, visual discrimination, visual spatial relationships, visual figure-ground, visual closure, laterality, reversals, and more.
SYMPTOMS CHECKLIST
If you find yourself answering yes to one or more of these symptoms, you or your child may be struggling with a vision problem. Contact us to see how we can help!
-
Skips lines when reading or copying
-
Loses place while reading or copying
-
Skips words while reading or copying
-
Substitutes words while reading or copying
-
Rereads words or lines
-
Reads slowly
-
Vision blurs at distance when looking up from near work
-
Eye that drifts inwards or outwards
-
Double or blurry vision with reading or near work
-
Squints, closes, or covers one eye while reading
-
Poor reading comprehension
-
Short attention span with near work
-
Avoids near work/reading
-
Headaches with near work or at the end of the day
-
Unusual blinking
-
Feels sleepy when reading
-
Difficulty with sports involving good eye-hand coordination
-
Unusual clumsiness, poor coordination
-
Unusual eye rubbing
-
Watery eyes
-
Light sensitive
-
Turn or tilt of the head or covers an eye while reading
-
Concerns with attention or behavior
-
For children, homework taking longer than it should
GETTING STARTED
A Visual Skills Assessment is typically a one-hour evaluation, in which the doctor will test the areas above using specialized instruments, eye tracking techniques, dynamic focusing lenses and prisms, and developmental testing.
If required, a Visual Information Processing Assessment will be scheduled, which includes perceptual flashcards, laterality and reversals testing, handwriting assessment, and further visual-motor integration testing.
If a visual skills disorder is diagnosed, treatment may include specialized glasses, light filters or tints, and/or in-office vision therapy sessions. The optimal treatment for you or your child will be selected based on your specific results.