Tools and a community for QTVIs,built from practice.

VI-Labs began with one practising QTVI’s frustration. Our understanding of vision impairment and CVI has moved a long way, yet much of the work still runs on photocopied sheets and Word documents, and good ideas are developed alone and rarely shared. We meet at a conference once a year, feel inspired, and go back to working on our own.

VI-Labs gives that work a shared place: tools that do the formatting, so the time goes to pupils, and a community where QTVIs decide what gets built next.

Every tool starts from what the room asks of a pupil: the size of the writing on the board, the glare from a window, the clutter around a display, the pace of a lesson. Functional vision assessment remains the foundation. Describing the room alongside it shows which changes belong to the school, so the school becomes part of what helps.

VI-Labs is built by Dr Dan Downes, a practising QTVI. His doctoral research examined mainstream primary teachers’ attitudes towards blind pupils, and the school systems that shape them. That work runs through the tools: they describe what the room asks before what a pupil finds hard, and they are written to support teachers, who often say vision impairment is the need they feel least confident meeting.

VI-Labs is a workshop: a place where practitioners build, test and refine the things that help them work well for the children and young people they support. What gets built next comes from QTVIs in the Community Lab.