What would you do?

…you are diagnosed with a somewhat rare, thoughusually treatable disease, but within four months, the disease attacks your optic nerve and your vision is gone.

…you have worked for twelve years as a master plumber, enjoying the job immensely, even traveling to Saudi Arabia for contract work, when suddenly you lose peripheral vision and your central vision blurs. You are no longer able to perform your job. You have glaucoma.

…. you do everything you can to manage your diabetes: measure your blood sugars regularly, take your insulin appropriately, eat well, exercise. In spite of everything, you cannot prevent the diabetic retinopathy that obliterates the vision in your left eye totally and leaves only limited vision in your right eye.

…you have lived with your retinitis pigmentosa since you were a teen, but now, at age 32, your peripheral vision has disappeared
and at night and on rainy or cloudy days, your central vision clouds over, and you can hardly see at all. Your job is in jeopardy and you’ve stopped going out with your friends on Friday and Saturday nights. It’s too hard. You don’t want to be dependent or hold them back from having fun.

What would you do? Hopefully, you would call the Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired (CBVI) for help.

These situations and eye conditions have actually occurred in the lives of CBVI clients whom we have helped. Through the Blindness Skills Training Program offered at the Center, clients, faced with life altering vision impairment and blindness, learn to adapt to their vision loss and to live their lives safely, independently and productively.

In the Blindness Skills Training Program, students receive instruction
in Orientation and Mobility, Home Management, and Communications.
They also participate in a specialized service called VACE (vocational
assessment and career exploration).

Orientation and Mobility teaches students safe travel skills and, in
most cases, to use the white cane. Good travel skills are the first stepto independence.

Home Management class stresses adaptive or alternative techniques
for performing all tasks necessary to live independently and safely in

VACE instructor, Marvin Price (left),
measures the tactile sensitivity of
student, Iduan Ortiz.