Welcome.

I’m an optometrist (a vision professional who has been trained in understanding and examining eyes) with more experience than most in helping people with impaired vision make the best use of their sight. You can read more about who I am at this link.

In my work in the Low Vision Clinic, I can only see one patient at a time. I enjoy that work, but I’m well aware that there are millions of people around the world who don’t have a trained low vision professional to help them. This site is an effort to share what I know in the hope that more people will get the care they need.

So this site is for anyone with an interest in low vision. Perhaps you have low vision, or perhaps a friend or family member has low vision. Perhaps you want to support and retain a valued employee who has developed a vision impairment. Perhaps you are a vision professional who wants to better understand how to help your patients who have low vision. This site is for all of you.

What is ‘low vision’? There are technical definitions, but in essence it means that you have a vision impairment that’s not correctable with glasses or contact lenses, but that you still have some useful vision. So it excludes absolute blindness, or close to that, but it does include a lot of people who might be considered ‘legally blind’. In essence, low vision work is about helping people do better with the vision they still have.

The main content of this site is designed to bring you to an understanding of how vision works, how vision can become impaired, and then the principles and practicalities of figuring out how to get stuff done with impaired vision. That might mean using magnifiers, better lighting, a bit of lateral thinking, or even a bit of cheating — whatever works.

In terms of structure, consider it as being kind of like a book. It’s meant to be read from the beginning to the end, because there’s a logical sequence of information, each chapter building on what you’ve learned in previous chapters. Sure, you can jump around if you like, but you’ll get the most out of it if you read through it all in sequence.

If you’re a vision professional, I recommend that you also start by reading the main content, even if you’re confident you already know all the basics. Communication is a core skill in rehabilitation, and I’ve always found it helpful and stimulating to hear how fellow professionals explain things to their patients — I hope that hearing how I explain things will bring you some value. However, throughout the core content there will be linked sections for vision professionals, which will be much more technical. Some will be short clinical/practical tips for helping your patients. But many will be much more extensive. Some will review technical aspects that you might have been taught in your initial training, but might understand better when presented with more context. Others will be introduce and expand an extended theoretical framework that I’ve developed myself over the years, which I think help us better make sense of what we see in clinical practice.

This is what the vision professional links look like:

If you’re not a vision professional, but you want to read the VP section, be my guest! There’s nothing secret there, and I admire inquisitive minds. 🙂

As I write this in 2025, the entire website is in the midst of a major overhaul, which is a huge and messy job. You will find a mixture of old content and new, and the structure might not always integrate well. I will be continuing to add new content from time to time, and integrating old content in with the new. Eventually it should all come together. Please keep revisiting the site to see how it’s going.

The pages of technical content from the original site are listed in the ‘For Vision Professionals‘ section. I will eventually take them down, once their content has all been integrated into the main structure.

If you get lost, just come back to the Contents page. If you’re in the old “For VPs” section, go to that link in the top menu to get a separate index page.