Helping Your Child with Blindness or Low Vision Craft a Functional Disability Statement

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The ability to describe one’s vision is a valuable skill. Certainly, your grade schooler’s educational team and peers are curious as to what your child can see and how they accomplish various tasks. Your child’s grade school teachers and peers may choose to ask your child about their vision to gain a better understanding. It will not always be that simple.

In the future, your child will interview for jobs. The interviewers cannot legally ask about your child’s blindness or low vision until they have disclosed it. The panel will likely make inaccurate assumptions and question whether or not your child will be capable of fulfilling the job responsibilities. Your child will be more successful by preparing to answer the potential employer’s unspoken questions and concerns.

This conversation your grown child will have at job interviews—informing a potential boss about their capabilities for job tasks—is called a functional disability statement. This statement conveys basic information about your child’s vision and how they may accomplish tasks differently.

APH ConnectCenter has multiple resources on the topic of describing one’s eye condition and creating a functional disability statement, including:

Anyone with a disability (especially a disability that is noticeable), should get comfortable talking about that disability using positive language, discussing how it changes the way she accomplishes tasks, and providing supporting evidence of their ability to accomplish tasks.

Preparing Your Child to Discuss their Eye Condition

Here are some ideas for preparing your child for such experiences.

  • Help your child come to terms with their eye condition. A disability is one aspect of life, not the defining feature. Others become comfortable if they notice your child is comfortable with their vision.
  • Model positive language regarding their eye condition. Help your child focus on what they can do and who they are instead of focusing on what is lacking.
  • Teach your child to describe what they can see. It is important to keep a disability statement simple and free from medical terms. They may say, “I have a small amount of vision. I can only see in the center field. In this room, I can see the paper you are holding, but when I look toward the paper, I can’t see much else.”

Let Your Child Take the Lead

Your child is ready to share information about their eye condition. Now they can take the lead in conversations to share the tools, what they need and develop self-advocacy skills.

  • Help your child recognize their abilities and communicate them with others.
  • Talk with your child about how they accomplish some tasks differently than sighted people. Help your child acknowledge the differences and provide opportunities to teach others about their methods.
  • Give your child opportunities to demonstrate assistive technology. Show curious friends, educate the IEP team, and introduce the technology to teachers each year.
  • Coach your child in respectfully answering others’ questions about their blindness or low vision. Explain to your child that most people do not understand what having limited or no vision is like. Help them understand that if the situation was reversed, your child would want a respectful answer to their questions.
  • Help your child understand and anticipate possible concerns and questions of his teachers, friends, service providers, and future employers. Teach your child to address the concerns and questions.

Three common concerns of potential employers include an assumed lack of safety, an assumed lack of productivity, and insecurity about getting printed material to a person with blindness or low vision.

Talk about these concerns with your older grade-schooler. Offer encouragement for mobility training to travel safely, praise when you recognize a strong work ethic, assistance to get the tools and training needed to be productive at school, and advocacy to ensure your child learns the technology needed to access written material.

The employer’s concerns are justified unless your child actively works on these skills. With the right motivation and many years of hard work throughout grade school and beyond, your child can completely disprove and address employer concerns.