title: Vision screening of illiterate populations.
abstract: To assess the amount of reduced vision in a population is an important public health matter, especially in areas where blinding diseases are endemic. Testing visual acuity is, however, a complex problem when a major part of the population is illiterate. The best-known test of vision is the E-test, but this produces the problem of untestability in illiterate populations.The introduction of the Sjögren hand-test as an alternative to the E-test for vision screening of unselected illiterate populations in West Africa resulted in a highly significant reduction of untestability. For certain vision levels it is possible to correlate the results of the hand-test directly with those of the E-test. The hand-test is less well defined than the E-test, but has important advantages for the purpose of vision screening of illiterate populations.
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D004522:Educational Status; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D014787:Vision Tests / Q000379:methods*