Millions of people in the US are living with blindness or low vision that can’t be addressed with corrective lenses or medical treatment. They go to school, build careers, and participate in their communities, often with the support of technology and service animals. For Low Vision Awareness Month, we’re taking a quick look at some of the current NIDILRR-funded projects focusing on improving opportunities for people who are blind or have low vision to participate at school, at work, and in their communities.

• Kids Like Me Bookshelf Improves Self-Determination Skills for Students with a Vision Impairment via Role-Model Stories Cowritten by Generative AI is developing an AI-assisted ghostwriting tool to empower an adult with a disability to author a role-model story for students with the same disability.
• Middle School Social Stories to Improve Social Skills for Students who are Blind or have Low Vision is developing and testing Accessible Virtual Adventures to help middle school students with a vision impairment to practice and improve social skills.
• Personalized Music Biofeedback Rehabilitation for Adolescents with Visual Impairment is testing whether a personalized music biofeedback rehabilitation system will improve rehabilitation engagement and outcomes for adolescents with blindness or visual impairment who have difficulty with proprioception and postural control.
• Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers (RERC) Program: RERC on Blindness and Low Vision is making digital maps accessible to mobile blind users via an audio interface, developing AI-based tools for micro-navigation tasks, and developing practical binocular training tools for individuals with central visual field loss to improve task performance and reduce falls, among others research and development activities.
• Rehabilitation Research and Training Center (RRTC) on Employment Among People Who are Blind or Have Low Vision is developing and testing a flash mentoring intervention for adults, scaling up a video intervention to educate people about blindness and low vision by implementation in real-world settings, and increasing adoption of and engagement with a mobile app for parents and youth, among other projects.
• RRTC on Employment Among Transition-Age Youth with Disabilities 2024 is developing and evaluating a peer mentoring intervention to increase career development for students who are blind, low-vision, and deaf/blind.

These are just a few of the grantees conducting research and development to support full participation of people who are blind or have low vision. You can learn more about these and others in our NIDILRR Program Database!