Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness

Health promotion interventions for adults who are visually impaired have received little attention. This article reports what is currently known about the health, overweight and obesity, and levels of physical activity reported by these adults. Conclusions about the need for health promotion activities based on this information are provided, and suggestions for implementing these activities or interventions are offered.

This article describes the development and evaluation of a short form of the 24-item Adaptation to Age-Related Vision Loss (AVL) scale. The evaluation provided evidence of the reliability and validity of the short form (the AVL12), for significant interindividual differences at the baseline and for individual-level change in AVL scores over time. Thus, the AVL12 maintains strong psychometric properties and is a shorter, more efficient measure for assessing adaptation to age-related vision loss in both research and clinical settings.

This pilot study compared the development of two groups of adolescents—those whose parents were blind and those whose parents were sighted. It found that there were no essential differences between the groups. Moreover, the friendship relationships, feelings toward parents, and some essential characteristics of the adolescents’ emotional state were more positive among the adolescents whose parents were blind.