A vision impairment can make daily life more challenging. Upon receiving a diagnosis, you and your family are bound to have questions about the future, how you’ll manage, and what’s possible. The information on this page will help to answer these questions. There’s lots of support available to help you to live independently with a good quality of life, enjoying the things that make you happy.
Whether you’re having your initial eyecare appointment, or are looking for help during and after diagnosis, there’s support available for you.
For adults, the Adult Eye Care Support Pathway has been designed to help individuals with sight loss navigate their journey. This guide was developed by RNIB in partnership with other sight loss charities, including Guide Dogs.
For those under the age of 18, Guide Dogs has worked with the wider sight loss sector to produce the Eye Care Support Pathway for Children and Young People with Vision Impairment in England. This pathway provides an overview of the typical NHS support journey in England, along with the wider social and educational support services available. It’s designed to support children and their parents or guardians on their journey from pre-diagnosis through to accessing adult services.
People with vision loss can be certified as ‘sight impaired’ or ‘severely sight impaired’ (legally blind). Your ophthalmologist can advise whether you’re eligible and complete a certificate of visual impairment (CVI) for you. This enables you to register as sight impaired and helps you access a range of services, benefits, and other support.
To be certified as sight impaired or severely sight impaired, your ophthalmologist will assess your visual acuity and field of vision. To be certified as severely sight impaired (legally blind), your sight will need to meet one of these descriptions:
If you have a certificate of visual impairment, you can register with your local authority, which keeps a confidential list of people with sight impairments. Being registered can make you eligible for extra help, assessment, and support. Your local services team can give you more information about the benefits of registering with them.
By registering as sight impaired with your local authority, you’ll be eligible for extra concessions that help with the day-to-day costs and practicalities of living with a visual impairment. These include:
You may also be eligible for some welfare benefits, but some are means-tested or depend on your income. Help for people with visual impairments and their families can include:
You can find more information about the benefits available through the government website.
One of the best sources of support can be other people living with blindness and visual impairment. They'll often have great practical tips and ideas you might not find elsewhere, as well as understanding the emotional side of living with sight loss.
The Guide Dogs help line, Guide Line, can put you in touch with local support groups. You can also search the Visionary website to find support from local organisations.
Your eye care team should refer you for help to manage at home – many adaptations and adjustments can make life easier and safer. These include equipment, skills and tactics, and technology around the house.
Your ophthalmologist can refer you to a specialist low-vision clinic for a low vision assessment (LVA). A low vision assessment explores what useful vision you have and the aids that will be the most helpful for you.
Social services can assess the support you need for living independently at home. This could include help with cooking, cleaning, staying safe at home, and getting around outside.
You may get help from a Vision Rehabilitation Specialist. They can help you learn or re-learn the skills you need to cope with the practicalities of daily life with sight loss.
There are many kinds of assistive technology and kit to help with daily living. From relatively simple tools like a liquid level indicator to stop you from overfilling your mug to more advanced technologies such as computer screen reading software, voice recognition technology, e-readers, and accessibility features and apps on smartphones, there’s plenty of tech out there.
Braille uses a combination of raised dots to depict the alphabet and numbers, allowing you to read with your fingers. Find out more about learning braille for adults and children.
There are online resources that can help you with independent living skills at home and personal care.
You can work with a vision impairment with the help of some adjustments and support. Employers have a legal duty to make reasonable adjustments that meet your needs.
There may be practical things that will help, including:
The Access to Work scheme also gives grants for equipment or services above and beyond the adjustments your employer should make. These can be used in many ways, for example: for help getting to and from work if you can't use public transport, to pay for a support worker at work, for specialist equipment, and more.
Having a vision impairment can make it harder to find work. It's important to know your rights and feel confident talking to prospective employers, not just about your skills and capabilities but also your support needs, such as the use of adaptive technology.
It’s natural to think about how you’ll navigate your home and outdoors with a visual impairment, especially if you’re diagnosed as an adult.
Moving about can be more challenging at home, and you may need to learn some new skills and tactics. It can take a while to learn these, but your confidence will grow in time. Some of the techniques that could help you include:
Sometimes you can have an eye condition but still meet the DVLA's minimum standard for driving by wearing prescription glasses, for example. However, this is unlikely if you are sight impaired or severely sight impaired. If you've been used to driving, this can be hard to come to terms with.
It's helpful to know the transport options near you – buses, trains, or taxis. If you are registered as sight impaired, you can get help with concessions such as the Disabled Person's Railcard and discounts for bus travel. Plus, there are plenty of apps to help you navigate public transport.
If your child has a vision impairment, it’s likely that you’ll need to speak to their school about the support they’ll need. The school will need to think about adjustments for your child’s everyday learning, but also for exams, school clubs, school trips, and the school’s physical environment. Some examples of support in school could include:
Please visit our page on reasonable adjustments in schools to access our guides. These guides are tailored to whether your child will attend school in England, Scotland, or Wales.
At Guide Dogs, we have a wide range of services, both with and without guide dogs, and a team of experts who can work with you to understand your needs and agree on a plan that’s right for you.
The ways we could help you:
Enquire today, so we can help to find solutions that work for you.
Guide Dogs is committed to working alongside people with a range of vision impairments, who are registered as either sight-impaired or severely sight-impaired.
Our staff undergo comprehensive training in supporting individuals with vision impairment, to enable us to support you every step of the way through one of our many services, with and without dogs. We foster knowledge of living with vision impairment and create content in collaboration with our Vision Rehabilitation Specialists and Habilitation Specialists.
This content is periodically reviewed as we continue to embrace new knowledge and up-to-date information, in order to improve how we deliver our services and advice.
Please note: Whilst Guide Dogs may be able to suggest various third-party websites which may be able to assist you, those are not endorsed by Guide Dogs. Guide Dogs have no control over those third parties and cannot be held responsible for the accuracy of information and support they can provide or the suitability and quality of any products or services they provide.
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