When someone is told their sight is deteriorating, one of the first thoughts is nearly always work. Can I keep doing my job? Do I have to tell my employer? What happens to my career now? I have sat on both sides of that conversation, and I can tell you the honest answer: with the right adjustments, the overwhelming majority of people with sight loss can carry on working, and working well. A sight loss workplace assessment is how you find out what those adjustments are.
What a sight loss workplace assessment involves
It is a specialist, practical assessment of how a person’s sight affects them in their role. An experienced assessor spends time with the employee, at the workplace or remotely, talking through their duties and looking at how their vision functions across real tasks: screen work, reading, lighting, moving around the workplace and travelling. It is entirely non-clinical. Nothing is tested, nothing is diagnosed, and there is nothing to pass or fail. The employer then receives a written report recommending specific adjustments, with suppliers and costs, so support can be put in place quickly.
Sight loss during a working life is different
Someone who has been visually impaired since childhood has usually had years to build their toolkit. Sight loss that arrives mid-career is a different experience altogether. The person has often spent decades working one way and now finds that way slipping out of reach, sometimes gradually, sometimes quickly. Many keep it to themselves for far too long, straining to carry on as before, because they fear being seen as a problem.
A good assessment meets people exactly where they are. It captures how their vision functions now, not what a diagnosis letter says, and it recommends adjustments they can adopt at a manageable pace, with proper training rather than a box of unfamiliar equipment. Where a condition is likely to change, the report says so plainly, and the assessment can be revisited as things develop so support keeps pace with reality.
Where the barriers usually hide
The barriers sight loss creates at work are often smaller and more specific than people imagine, which is exactly why they respond so well to the right adjustment. Screen work is the obvious one: text that has quietly crept down to an uncomfortable size, spreadsheets that take three times the effort they used to, eyes that are burning by mid-afternoon. But the list runs wider. Glare from a window behind a monitor. Printed documents nobody thought to provide electronically. A stationery cupboard reorganised without warning. A hot-desking policy that means relearning the route to your desk every morning. None of these is dramatic on its own. Together they drain energy and confidence, and every one of them has a solution.
The report that follows the assessment deals in those specifics. It might pair magnification software with proper training, move a desk away from the glare, specify an electronic document standard, or recommend simple consistency in where things live. It names suppliers and costs so nothing stalls at the research stage.
You do not need to be registered blind
A persistent myth stops many people asking for help: the belief that support is only for those who are registered blind or severely sight impaired. It is not true. If sight loss is affecting someone at work, they are entitled to ask for reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act 2010, whatever their registration status. Function is what matters, and function is exactly what the assessment measures.
The conversation many employees dread
For an employee, the hardest part of sight loss at work is often not the sight loss. It is the conversation about it. People worry that disclosing a deteriorating condition will mark them out, stall their career or start a process they cannot control. In practice, a workplace assessment usually makes that conversation easier, not harder. It gives everyone a neutral, constructive next step: rather than the employee having to arrive with answers they do not yet have, the employer simply arranges for a specialist to find them. The focus shifts immediately from what is wrong to what would help, which is a far better conversation for both sides.
Why it makes business sense
For employers, this is a retention question. An employee with developing sight loss is the same experienced, knowledgeable person they were before their diagnosis. Losing them means losing that experience and paying to recruit and train a replacement, when the adjustments that would have kept them are often modest, and Access to Work, the government scheme described at gov.uk, may share the cost. In my experience the barrier is rarely money. It is simply not knowing what is possible, and that is precisely the gap the report closes.
Signs it might be time to arrange one
You don’t need a formal diagnosis or a registration certificate to justify arranging an assessment. Common triggers include screens that need enlarging more than they used to, headaches or eye strain that build through the day, printed material that’s becoming harder to manage, or simply a growing sense of working harder than you used to for the same result. Any of these is reason enough to ask.
Frequently Asked Questions
No. Function is what matters, not registration status. If sight loss is affecting you at work, you're entitled to ask for reasonable adjustments regardless of whether you're registered.
No. Nothing is tested or diagnosed. The assessment looks at how your vision functions across real tasks in your actual job, not at your eyes themselves.
The report will say so plainly, and the assessment can be revisited as things change, so support keeps pace with reality rather than being fixed at a single point in time.
No, referrals are always made with the employee's agreement, and the assessment is a conversation, not something done to you.
The first step
If sight loss is affecting you or someone in your team, do not wait until the struggle is visible. You can read about our visual impairment workplace assessments, and our visual impairment awareness e-learning is a straightforward way to build understanding across the whole team.