RO&Ming with Lil

Erica Tandori is a visual artist with two kids, a cat, a hole in the backyard, a doctorate, a university job, and Stargardt’s Disease. This juvenile form of macular degeneration means that Erica has trouble seeing what she is looking at directly, but her peripheral vision is still useful. Erica describes it as colourful, soft and blurry like “living in a Monet painting,” with the occasional visual hallucination to keep her guessing. Erica has not had orientation and mobility training, but she was interested in doing a VROOM and OMO assessment via interview. We discussed the environments where Erica typically travels, choosing to compare Level 3 on the O&M Environmental Complexity Scale – the area around her home – with Level 6 – bus and train travel to work, with uncontrolled road crossings and navigating bus bays at uni. Erica scored OMO 39/50 for her functional orientation and mobility skills and VROOM 29/50 for functional vision during travel.

Jo Anson-Smith is a dual qualified Occupational Therapist/Orientation and Mobility (O&M) Specialist working in Newcastle, Australia. When we talked with Jo in Episode 2, she was exploring tele-practice with occupational therapy clients, but she hadn’t yet made the leap into O&M tele-practice. In this episode we talk with Jo about teaching the long cane to a man with intellectual disability, via Zoom. Then Jo describes her first VROOM and OMO functional assessment with a client, via FaceTime – how she prepared, the technology she used, what worked well, and some scoring questions that arose: what if we don't or can't assess in a dynamic environment?

This episode introduces VROOM and OMO – two functional assessment tools created by an O&M specialist who loves ridiculous acronyms. VROOM stands for vision-related outcomes in orientation and mobility, and OMO stands for orientation and mobility outcomes. These are constructivist (not objective or subjective) assessment tools designed to co-rate a client’s functional vision and mobility, giving each a score out of 50. We meet Ewa Borkowski from Guide Dogs NSW/ACT, whose team is using the VROOM and OMO tools during ordinary O&M assessment. This includes working from the COVID cave.

This podcast is recorded in the time of Coronavirus lockdown, when Orientation and Mobility (O&M) specialists are fast needing to learn about tele-practice. We meet four O&M specialists from Guide Dogs NSW/ACT who are venturing into the brave new world of O&M tele-practice:  Amy McKibbins, Zoë Gephart, Tayler McBrien, and Jo Anson-Smith

This episode introduces ROaMing with Lil. It describes the role of an Orientation and Mobility Specialist, and a profession that does its best work on street corners! ROaMing with Lil is intended to provide a forum for people to learn more about functional vision, and orientation and mobility practice from an Australian perspective. It offers professional development for O&M specialists and guide dog mobility instructors worldwide.