01/15/2026
Visual skills that can be developed and enhanced through Vision Therapy include:
✅Oculomotor skills: The ability to follow along the lines of print of a book. If eye movements are slow, jumpy or clumsy, an individual’s performance can be inhibited. There are two types of oculomotor skills, pursuits and saccades.
âś…Pursuits: The ability to follow a moving object smoothly and accurately with both eyes, such as moving from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line when reading.
Saccades: The ability to quickly and accurately locate and inspect a series of stationary objects, one after another, such as moving from word to word while reading.
âś…Accommodation (focusing) skills: The ability to look quickly from far to near and vice versa without momentary blur, such as looking from chalkboard to a book.
âś…Binocular Vision (eye teaming) skills: The ability to use both eyes together, smoothly, equally, simultaneously and accurately. Proper eye teaming permits us to see three dimensionally when working with objects in space and to accurately perceive depth and distances between objects. For example, when reading, the eyes converge (or turn in) for proper eye alignment. Common disorders of binocular vision include:
âś…Strabismus: When the two eyes are not always in perfect alignment due to poor eye teaming skills. Because the two eyes are pointing in different directions, the brain receives confusing signals. Double vision or the suppression of vision in the deviated eye results.
✅Amblyopia: This occurs if the brain suppresses the signals from one eye for an extended time period despite that eye being healthy. Amblyopia is often called “lazy eye” because one eye stops functioning properly. The eye-brain connection in the non-functioning eye is poor, and the brain ignores or suppresses most of it’s signals in order to make sense of what is seen. This is caused either by strabismus and/or a glasses prescription where the two eyes are very different.
âś…Convergence Insufficiency: A sensorimotor anomaly that affects the binocular visual system and is characterized by an inability to adequately converge (turn in) or sustain convergence for visual tasks at near.
✅Visual-motor integration (eye-hand coordination): The eyes and hands must be used as paired learning tools. Development in this area is essential when a child learns to write and later learns to read. Eye-hand coordination allows a child the orientation necessary to stay within the lines when writing. This skill is a very important preparatory step for the visual interpretation of words and numbers when reading. It’s also hugely important with most sports.
âś…Visual Perceptual skills allow us to relate to pictures and words seen on a printed page and discriminate between visible likenesses and differences. Poor memory and inattention to details are often mistakenly cited as the causes of learning related problems. In reality, poor memory and inattention to details are symptoms of poor visual perception.
âś…Visual Discrimination is the ability to match or determine exact characteristics of two forms when one of the forms is among similar forms.
âś…Visual Memory is the ability to remember the characteristics of a given form and to find that form in an array of similar forms.
âś…Visual Spatial Relationship is the ability to determine, from among five forms of identical configuration, the one single form or part of a single form, that is going in a different direction from the others.
âś…Visual Form Constancy is the ability to see a form, and find that form, even though the form may be smaller, larger, rotated, reversed and/or hidden.
âś…Visual Sequential Memory is the ability to remember for immediate recall a series of forms from among four separate series of forms.
