Austin Assessment Family

The Austin Assessment is a fun, simple card-matching game that screens children for cerebral visual impairment (CVI).

It’s been validated on over 900 children, and it works by comparing children’s performance to the normative range for their age group.


Who can use it?

The Austin Assessment is for parents, caregivers and individuals who want to easily screen their child for CVI-related visual issues. It allows you to:
• easily complete up to 5 screenings
• Email or print results from a pdf document
• use practice mode to help your child improve at dealing with visual complexity.

If you’re a clinician, researcher or teacher, we recommend the Austin Assessment for Professionals.

The Austin Assessment is not a diagnostic tool. It can identify if there is a possibility your child may have a form of CVI, but it can’t rule out other conditions. You’ll need an official diagnosis from a medical professional to confirm the presence of CVI.


Who can complete a screening?

The Austin Assessment was validated on children aged 5-18. To complete a screening, your child needs to be able to:
• understand the goal of the game
• recognise individual cards
• use their finger to drag cards to match them with each other.

This means children with some types of cognitive, visual or motor difficulties may not be able to complete a screening.


How does the app work?

The Austin Assessment works by tracking your child’s eye movements while they play a simple card-matching game.

There is a multi-coloured version of the game and a single-coloured version. Your child needs to complete both to finish the assessment. Both versions start at a basic level and gradually get more complex.

The way a child with CVI-related visual issues looks at things is different from the way a child with typical vision does. The Austin Assessment identifies these differences. They
• darting eye movements
• taking longer to match the cards as more cards are added
• becoming less accurate as more cards are added
• slower response time to visual stimuli.

Because these differences can also be present in other conditions, the Austin Assessment does not give a diagnosis. Instead, it indicates whether your child should be seen by a specialist who can make a diagnosis.

After completing a screening, you’ll be able to download, email or print a report that summarises your child’s results and whether CVI seems to be a possibility.


Data privacy and storage

The data from your screenings is held securely and meets health and medical data storage privacy laws and requirements.

We may use data from your screenings to improve the Austin Assessment and help with CVI research. We collect the following information:
• age
• known conditions (if provided)
• assessment data including eye movements, accuracy in matching the pairs, time taken to match the first pair at each level and overall time taken.

We do not collect any personal identifying information, however anonymised data may be shared with third parties for the purpose of research and furthering our understanding of CVI.


Origins of the Austin Assessment

The Austin Assessment was developed by Dr Nicola McDowell, who established the Austin McDowell Foundation to provide education and support for those affected by brain-based visual issues. The foundation is a not-for-profit that aims to help improve quality of life for people with CVI through research and by providing access to simple and effective screening tools.