| Description |
As a former teacher of the visually impaired I was struck by the fact that a subgroup of children with whom I worked did not respond to typical interventions used with children with significant visual impairment (e.g., multi-sensory approaches, narrating what was going on around the child) -- several children appeared to retreat or become distressed engaging in stereotypic behavior. Literature in the vision field did not provide an adequate explanation for the underlying causes of these behaviors aside from labeling the mannerisms as “blindisms” or “autistic-like” – believing that they were related to the child’s sensory impairments and lack of opportunities to engage in more typical social exchanges. Rarely was the question raised “could this child be autistic?” Given the current estimate of occurrence of autism in the general population is 1 in 54 (CDC 2020), a percentage of children with visual impairments will fall on the autism spectrum. This talk will review what autism spectrum disorders are, how they are diagnosed, and how to begin to differentiate between a typically developing child with a visual impairment and one who may have an autism spectrum disorder.
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