Life Skills

Making Living Easier

Everyday we perform a vast amount of activities that are essential for day-to-day living, including dressing, preparing food, eating, cleaning, reading and writing. Vision impairment can impact on all of these activities, making them more time consuming, difficult, and sometimes even potentially dangerous. Many people lose confidence with these activities and become anxious that they may never be able to manage them. An RGDT Life Skills program can assist people to perform these activities again (or perhaps for the first time) with safety, dignity and efficiency, often with the aid of specialised equipment. Programs are conducted within the home, community or work environment.

The service is available to people of all ages and with varying degrees of vision loss, including:

  • People with recent vision loss who require support and assistance to adjust and manage appropriate daily living skills.
  • People with long standing vision impairment who wish to take on new challenges such as moving out of home, beginning a new job or leisure pursuit, or just extending their existing skills.

Programs may cover training in the following areas:

  • Communication: Telephone use, reading and writing, computer use, money identification and handling.
  • Domestic: Pouring, labelling, food preparation, cleaning and operating appliances in the home.
  • Personal Care: Grooming, clothing identification.
  • Home Safety: Lighting and contrast, falls prevention, contrasting edges on steps.
  • Recreation / Leisure.

Our programs provide strategies for optimising the use of your residual vision, developing alternative methods, and incorporating environmental adaptations like lighting, glare reduction, use of contrast, use of bold or tactile labelling. There is also an extensive range of specialised aids and equipment that can be utilised to complete tasks, and these can trialled and purchased during a program. Examples include aids that: talk (e.g. clocks, scales); have large print or buttons (e.g. telephones); enlarge print (e.g. optical and video magnifiers); or aids to organise and label medication, food or clothes.

Each program is individually tailored to take into consideration the client’s short or long term goals and may vary in length from one to multiple sessions, mostly provided in the home or community setting and often in conjunction with an Orientation and Mobility program.