Assessment of Autism Spectrum Disorders in Children with Visual Impairment and Blindness: A Scoping Review.
No standard autism test works straight out of the box for blind kids—you have to tweak or create tools and keep your own data.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Morie et al. (2025) hunted for papers that test kids with both autism and visual problems. They found only 13 studies worldwide. None offered a ready-made autism test for blind or low-vision children.
The team mapped what researchers did instead: swap visual tasks for touch or sound, drop items that need eyesight, or invent brand-new probes.
What they found
Every paper used a different patchwork of changes. No two teams followed the same steps. No tool came with norms for blind kids.
Bottom line: there is no off-the-shelf autism test you can give a visually impaired child and trust the score.
How this fits with other research
Hagopian et al. (1999) warned that blind toddlers often flap or echo words just like autistic kids. Their data fit today's gap: you must sort autism-like blindness from true autism, but current tools blur the line.
Grahame et al. (2015) proved visual activity schedules work for sighted autistic learners. Morie's review shows these same schedules need tactile or audio make-overs for blind children—an example of the rewrite clinicians face.
Spiegel et al. (2023) gave us the ABCS video-coding tool. It tracks short-term social change in sighted preschoolers. Morie's map reveals ABCS has no blind-child version yet, so it joins the long list of tests needing vision-free items.
Why it matters
If you assess a child who is blind, expect the ADOS, CARS, or any social-communication checklist to over-flag autism. Build extra steps: ask parents about social interest when toys are auditory, test joint attention with sound cues, and rule out blindness-only mannerisms. Track your changes so the next BCBA can repeat them. Push your team to collect local norms—right now, that's the only way to make sense of the numbers.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
There is a higher incidence of diagnosed Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in children with visual impairment and blindness (VIB) than in typically sighted children. However, we currently lack appropriate assessment measures to fully understand the neurodevelopment of children with VIB. Numerous factors, such as common characteristics between children with VIB and ASD and the reliance of visual behaviours in assessments of ASD, complicate the clinical and diagnostic understanding of these children. This scoping review aims to describe the published knowledge on ASD assessment in children with VIB. The literature search was performed through MEDLINE, PsycINFO and Scopus. Reference lists of pertinent articles were scrutinized for snowball searching. Articles retained were based on original empirical studies, were relevant to or conducted with children or adolescents with VIB and described assessments for ASD. Pertinent information was extracted, and a thematic analysis was performed. Only 13 articles retrieved pertained to and described the assessment of ASD in children with VIB. The following themes emerged: appropriateness of commonly used ASD assessment tools for children with VIB, modification of pre-existing ASD assessment tools for a better assessment, creation of new assessment tools for this population, time points of assessment, and professional training and practice guidelines. The reviewed literature highlights that there is still much work to be done to better understand the complex relationship between VIB and ASD, and consensus is needed on how best to go about assessing neurodevelopmental disorders in children with VIB.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2025 · doi:10.1136/bcr-2019-232981