Hi, I'm Dr. Tiffany Chan.
I'm an optometrist in the Low Vision Rehabilitation Division
at the Wilmer Eye Institute,
Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center.
So the term low vision, refers to anyone who has chronic
vision impairment, that cannot be corrected with glasses,
contact lenses, medication, or even surgery.
So oftentimes, vision impairment can cause difficulty performing
daily activities, such as reading, seeing faces,
watching television or traveling independently.
So my job as a vision rehabilitation specialist
is to try to maximize the remaining vision
of those patients which chronic vision impairment.
I do that in a variety of different ways by using
different tools or devices such as magnifiers, filters,
contrast enhancement, or even using our other sense such as
our sense of touch or hearing to supplement the vision changes.
So I'm going to show you a few examples of devices that I
work with.
So this is an example of a traditional hand-held magnifier.
So with this one, similar to other magnifiers.
Has a light here and this can magnify the image and
allow a person to read small print again.
If someone has even more reduced vision or lower vision,
they may need more magnification.
So this is an example of an electronic magnifier.
So there's a camera on one side and
when you put that on top of the reading material,
it can enhance the magnification and we have a variety of
different settings to manipulate that print.
So for example, by pressing a button here,
I can increase the magnification.
So if someone has to read very small print then we'd use
a higher amount of magnification.
Or if they had large print on labels that they were looking at
in the grocery store, we would use less magnification.
Another feature of this magnifier is
contrast enhancement.
So contrast, or the boldness of print is very important for
being able to read especially if the print is very faint.
So by pressing this button we can enhance the contrast, or
make that print more bold and dark.
And by pressing the button again I can actually reverse
the polarity of the contrast.
So now the print is white with a black background,
rather than black print on a white background, and
that can make all the difference when people are trying to read
printed material.
So as I discussed earlier,
sometimes people have difficulty seeing things at a distance,
such as faces or watching television.
So this is an example of telescopic glasses.
So you can see there's a double lens here.
And that allows magnification when people are looking at
things far away.
So this type of device is worn similarly
to a traditional pair of glasses.
You can see how magnified the image is
when they are looking at a distant object.
And this can allow that person to see details
from watching television.
So another thing that we talked about earlier,
sometimes people have difficulty doing things and we need to
rely on other sense such as our sense of touch or hearing.
So this is an example of a clock.
If we press the button here.
[SOUND] >> The time is now seven minutes
to 10 AM.
>> So Instead of relying on our vision to be able to tell what
time it is, we can use our auditory to hear what time it
is, so there's a variety of different tools that we can use.
To supplement the vision in that way.
So if you or a loved one have chronic vision impairment
that is affecting your ability to perform daily activities.
You should schedule an appointment with me at
the Wilmer Eye Institute, Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center
in the ophthalmology department.