I teach an online course for teachers of students with autism and would be honored if you would be a Chat Guest. That would require you to log on to the course at an agreed upon time–if possible between now and December 9–and respond to typed questions by students for one hour. Unfortunately, I cannot pay you, but you will have the opportunity to educate teachers. The current unit is “Critical Issues.” Here are the four we focus on:

• When you don’t know something important for certain, what assumption will you make as you decide how to proceed?

• The terms “high functioning” and “low functioning” are widely used by professionals in the field of autism. What do they mean? Should we be using them?

• How is autism presented to the public? What kinds of public attitudes about people with autism does this type of presentation engender?

• Autistic neurology is different from typical neurology. People with autism cannot, therefore, understand exactly how we neurotypicals perceive the world. Can we understand exactly how people with autism perceive the world? Because they cannot understand how we perceive the world, does that mean they also do not understand how they themselves process their emotions and their thoughts?

Students’ questions are likely to be focused on these issues, though not necessarily. I would ask them to view your website prior to the Guest Chat. I would also ask them to read anything you would want to send in advance.

I look forward to hearing from you.

the reason i don’t understand this first-hand is i seem to always want extra light… i can’t even put down the windshield visors when i’m driving in the sun, becos they feel like giant eyelids closing off half my vision and making me feel sleepy. i think this is not normal.

of course it turns out my husband is skeptical about the different colored lenses (although he got sunglasses to wear inside?! but i guess light sensitivity is a different issue)… well, we’ll see if any experiment turns up a good result. Anyway thanks so much for the glasses link… will try for him and plus whenever I ever get around to getting another eye exam, i think i will order my next ones there.

One good way to experiment for low cost though is to go to a dollar store (if they have things like that where you live), and buy all different tints of sunglasses, then when you get a tint that’s sort of close to what you like, start ordering the glasses that are closest to that and see which work best. (This can take a long time, but in all the cost is still going to be less than an Irlen lens evaluation.)

If you have the money to fork out, you can go to the Irlen institute or any “Irlen screeners” and get tested, they have a huge long systematic way of doing it.  But the trouble is, you get a lot of screeners who won’t let you do unconventional things, and it costs a lot, and a lot of them focus entirely on the printed word rather than letting you look around at objects and in different lighting to see what is less overloading.  Try to find a screener (like the one in Modesto, California, who I’d highly recommend) who is willing to be unconventional and who wears tinted glasses themselves.

But you can do the whole thing for less money, it’s just that it’s way more work and time-intensive.

Amanda, thanks! Never in my life have I found prescription glasses this cheap. (I splurged a little on the tint and the anti-reflective coating, thirty bucks!) And evidently my pupils are unusually far apart, like I’m some kind of herbivore . . .