Macular Degeneration - Adaptive Devices

Adaptive Devices

Because peripheral vision is not affected, people with macular degeneration can learn to use their remaining vision to partially compensate. Assistance and resources are available in many countries and every state in the U.S. Classes for "independent living" are given and some technology can be obtained from a state department of rehabilitation.

Adaptive devices can help people read. These include magnifying glasses, special eyeglass lenses, computer screen readers, and TV systems that enlarge reading material.

Computer screen readers such as JAWS or Thunder work with standard Windows computers.

Video cameras can be fed into standard or special-purpose computer monitors, and the image can be zoomed in and magnified. These systems often include a movable table to move the written material.

Accessible publishing provides larger fonts for printed books, patterns to make tracking easier, audiobooks and DAISY books with both text and audio.

Read more about this topic:  Macular Degeneration

Famous quotes containing the words adaptive and/or devices:

    The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children’s adaptive capacity.
    David Elkind (20th century)

    Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.... Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.
    Jean Arp (1887–1948)