Screening Questions to Identify Low Vision and Acuity-Defined Legal Blindness.

ABSTRACT:

Purpose

Visual screening is important in public health, but visual acuity (VA) testing is costly at scale. We used items from a validated VA survey with 100 yes/no questions to identify screening questions for low vision (VA ≤ 0.3 logMAR or 20/40) and legal blindness as defined by the VA criterion (VA ≤ 1 logMAR or 20/200).

Methods

We analyzed data from 385 adults with measured VA who completed the survey. Participants were classified positive if they answered "no" to selected single, pair, and triplet items for each threshold. We computed sensitivity, specificity, and area under the curve (AUC).

Results

For low vision, "In a fast-food restaurant, can you read the posted menus?" yielded AUC = 0.85 (sensitivity = 0.89; specificity = 0.81). For legal blindness, "When se

SUBMITTER: Wu YH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12811891 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature