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Special Education

Notes clouds and the horizon, as well as very large objects such as mountains and other geographical units
or microscopic objects such as bacteria, cannot be perceived and must be conceived only by analogy
and extrapolation from objects actually experienced.
The tactual sense is the primary way in which a variety of concepts are acquired by the blind child.
There are two different kinds of tactual perception, synthetic touch and analytic touch. Synthetic
touch refers to a person's tactual exploration of small objects which are small enough to be enveloped
by one or both hands. Unfortunately most physical objects are too large for synthetic touch to be
useful. For these physical objects analytic touch has to be used. Analytic touch involves the touching
of various parts of an objects and then mentally constructing these separate parts. Whereas the sighted
person is able to perceive different objects or the parts of one object simultaneously, the blind person
must perceive thinks successively. This necessity for perception in a successive manner restricts the
blind child's ability to gain a conceptual understanding of his world.
They are very good at listening tasks. They score high on measures of creativity. Thus, even though
the are greatly disadvantaged in terms to cognitive development they are able to compenstate in
many ways.

The visually impaired people develop an increased ability in attention because their
reliance on other senses must be greater.

5.1.2 Causes
Cause of visual handicap can be both genetic and environmental. Visual impairment may be due to
accommodation or convergence problems. The major accommodation problems are myopia,
hyperopia, and astigmatism. In myopia, or nearsightedness, the individual can see visual stimuli at
close range but has trouble in seeing things at a distance. Among partially sighted children myopia
is common. Hyperopia is just the opposite of myopia. In astigmatism the individual faces focusing
problems. Hence, there is blurred or distorted vision.
5.1.3 Problems of Visually Impaired

The visually handicapped children have many problems like behavior problems, problems of learning,
problems of their placement in society or problems of social adjustment. Some problems are discussed
below:
(1) Poor Intelligence: Research analyses reveal that visually impaired children have a poor I.Q.
Since they have impairments in the exploration of their environments, they have impairments
also in concept formation resulting in their poor performance in intelligence tests. Some
intelligences test are measured by degrees of information, knowledge or experience. But for
blind child, this pattern of scoring is reduced to a very low level.
(2) Academic Retardation: These children have poor academic achievements even if they use large
types of Braille. They are noted to be retarded by at least one to two years and are found to be
underachiever Visual impairment is the main factor for slower acquisition of information but
observation. These children have a slower reading rate and lack concretene in instructional
procedures.
(3) Slower Speech Development: Totally blind children cannot learn the art of speech by imitation.
They can only learn through what they hear from occasional touch observation. Through research
it has been discovered that acquisition of words may get hampered by blindness also.
(4) Personality Disorder: We known that personality develop includes both hereditary and
environmental factors. It is a psychophysi organization of the individual modified by his life
experiences. For congenit blind children, life experiences go in their own ways which are totally
different from normal children.

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