Visual impairment and the useful field of vision.

The aim of this study was to measure the useful field of vision (UFoV) in people with visual impairment and to compare results with clinical measures of vision. UFoV, visual acuity, contrast sensitivity and visual fields were measured in 36 participants with low vision and 22 age-matched controls in two age groups. For both the low vision and control groups the presence of distractors (cluttered field) increased the error rates on our UFoV measure but there was no significant effect of the presence of a central task (divided attention). Participants with low vision made more errors on UFoV than did controls, but this difference disappeared once their visual field defects were accounted for. By multiple regression analysis, age, visual fields and contrast sensitivity were shown to predict the different UFoV scores. As for observers with normal vision, standard clinical visual field tests may not fully describe the difficulties that may be encountered by people with visual impairment undertaking tasks in the cluttered environments and multiple demands of everyday life.