Generally there is usually Confusion when talking about disability visual, because they deal with terms that are related, but there are differences.
Now, from what percentage of decrease in visual acuity is it considered handicap?
Well, the first thing we must clarify when we talk about lazy eye in adults It is that this visual problem comes from not being treated in childhood, either because it has not been detected or because the corresponding measures have not been taken.
Therefore, the amblyopia It occurs when one of the two eyes shows a decrease in visual acuity.
Visual disability
In general, we tend to assimilate visual impairment with blind people, which is wrong.
Two measurement parameters are used to specify visual impairment.
The first is the visual acuity, which is the ability to distinguish the shapes of objects at a given distance. The most common exams are usually tests with letters or geometric figures.
Each test is divided into lines that the patient must identify and each line decreases one 10% visual acuity.
The second parameter is the Visual field, is the angle that the eye can see. Normally, each eye has a visual field of 90° so a person has an amplitude of 180° vision in the horizontal plane y 140° in the vertical plane.
Clarified all this, a person who has traditional de un 50% of visual rest can take a normal life.
However, if the visual remainder of a person is less al 50%, begin to have obvious difficulties and we could be facing a case of low vision.
If the percentage continues to decrease by value less than 20% visual rest, we find ourselves in a situation of severe difficulties, having to make use of visual adaptation techniques.
But there are more serious situations. These occur when it is not possible to overcome the 10% remaining visual and its visual field is limited to only 10°. In these cases, one begins to talk about legal blindness.
Finally, in the most extreme cases, we find the blindness total. This is detected when you can see nothing more than diffuse areas of light and shadow, or nothing at all.
low Vision
We commented in previous paragraphs on the concept of low vision. Well, it is considered low vision to loss of visual impairment that does not improve with drug treatments or surgery. This supposes a inability when doing daily tasks.
But when is a person considered to have low vision? When your visual acuity is less than 0,3, that is, the 30% vision in the best of eyes or whose Visual field is less than 20°.
Lazy eye disability in adults
At the beginning of the article, we defined adult amblyopia.
The different types of amblyopia are described here. There is the squint (when the eyes are misaligned), the refractive amblyopia (when the eye has a large or very irregular refractive error) and the deprivation amblyopia (when the eye is deprived of visual experience, for example, because of cataracts). The common denominator is that vision is impaired in the affected eye.
When the visual conditions of one eye and the other are different, a person can lose vision in the unused eye and become visually impaired.