Modern technologies, combined with new societal attitudes towards inclusion and access to care, are helping to advance the scope of products and services for those who are vision-impaired.

For those in the eyecare field and optical industry, looking to elevate the understanding and value of healthy vision to a wider audience, this is an emerging trend which is great news. Vision care also wants to convey its essential role to a wider consumer audience—as well as to other healthcare professionals, teachers, educators and public health policy makers. So new developments, combined with a healthy dose of visible social and mainstream media, are bringing about a new era which can amplify vision’s role in creating a happy, productive and satisfying life.

This is a big topic, but we are starting to see “low vision” and vision impairment and blindness being reconsidered. This means that more explaining and illuminating is actually going on out there. This can and will prompt informative conversations between eye doctors and patients, between patients and their families, between care providers and those who are trying to go through life with compromised vision or trying to adapt as best as they can do losing some or all of their vision.

Increasingly, expert organizations in the eyecare field are sharing the perspective that blindness is a “spectrum.” That loss of vision comes on differently for certain people, that the vision-impaired need and can benefit from specific types of technology assistance and treatment.

Groups ranging from the National Eye Institute and Prevent Blindness to Perkins School for the Blind and Perkins Access, Envision, The Lighthouse and others, including new popular advocates for education like Two Blind Brothers, are offering many resources to show, illustrate and explain this reality.

Public health oriented groups and NGOs ranging from the World Council of Optometry, the National Federation for the Blind, the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB) (200 members), and many more alliances, both in the U.S. and around the world, are working hard to bring issues like access to vision, technology solutions and the fundamental right to healthy vision to much larger swaths of patients, caretakers, educators and governments, too.

VM highlights just a few of the new approaches in its special feature this month. But keep an eye out for the eyecare profession’s growing role and opportunity to heighten, augment, uplift and help millions with these key messages and vision solutions, which will be beneficial for us all.

maxelrad@jobson.com