AI Resilience Report forLow Vision Therapists, Orientation and Mobility Specialists, and Vision Rehabilitation Therapists

Right now, AI is mostly helping — not replacing — the people who teach blind and low-vision clients how to live independently. The biggest wave of change is happening in the tools that clients use, not in the therapist's chair. Between 2023 and 2026, everyday assistive technology jumped from single-purpose gadgets to a wave of general-purpose AI, where a phone can now read a room, a pair of ordinary-looking sunglasses can call a volunteer, and a braille display can finally show a graph, according to a Disability World engineering primer ^[1].

This means Orientation and Mobility (O&M) specialists and vision rehab therapists increasingly teach clients how to use AI tools — an augmentation of their job rather than a replacement.

On the clinical side, AI is starting to sharpen assessments. At the 2026 ARVO Annual Meeting ^[2], researchers presented smart-glasses systems where participants wore smart glasses equipped with cameras that captured their first-person view, and computer models analyzed the recordings to measure environmental features that could assist or hinder the patient. A University of Wisconsin–Madison cross-disciplinary team ^[3] is also building AI-powered aids by directly engaging people with low vision in design strategies to better understand their daily challenges and priorities.

Documentation tasks (55% automatable) are the most exposed piece — AI scribes can now draft progress notes — but the hands-on teaching of cane skills and daily-living techniques still requires a human.

Adoption will likely be steady but cautious. The American Foundation for the Blind's Working with the Machine report (2026) ^[4] notes that as of the fourth quarter of 2025, 26% of workers reported using AI at least a few times per week while 12% reported daily use, yet nearly half (49%) of workers reported never using AI in their roles. Trust is the big brake: AFB researchers found that while AI-generated image descriptions have the potential to provide quicker, on-demand access to people who are blind, users still question how they can trust that a description is factual, and employers using AI risk bias against people with disabilities.

On the National Federation of the Blind's Access On podcast ^[5], AFB's director of research summarized: AI has a lot of potential to level the playing field, but it's not quite there yet — there are still hallucinations, mistakes, and shortcomings, plus questions about data privacy. Because these therapists work with vulnerable clients and safety-critical skills like street crossings, ethical and legal caution will slow full automation. The good news: the empathy, judgment, and physical coaching this career requires are exactly the human skills AI can't replicate — so your role is more likely to be supercharged by AI than replaced by it.