About Us
We help OTs give ABILITY back to clients with vision impairment
Hello
I’m Mary Warren
I am an occupational therapist and retired university professor who has studied, taught and treated adult clients with vision impairment from acquired brain injury for nearly 5 decades.
As a clinician and educator, my passion is to ensure that occupational therapists enable their clients to use their vision to participate in necessary and meaningful occupations. I teach a practical approach that focuses on gaining function over attempting to restore the client’s vision. I also believe strongly in using peer-reviewed published evidence to support practice that is clearly aligned with the Occupational Therapy Practice Framework and OT theories.
I have taught this approach through in-person workshops and lectures in the United States and internationally for three decades. Thousands of clinicians have taken my Part 1 and Part 2 courses on Evaluation and Intervention for Visual Processing Deficits in Adults with Acquired Brain injury.
The pandemic cancelled my in-person workshops and in its place offered an opportunity to begin delivering my lecture content via a web-based learning platform. Now I can reach a broader audience and I can also tailor course offerings to educate clinicians who want basic knowledge of evaluation and intervention and those who want advanced instruction to become an expert in a specific vision impairment. I am looking forward to using my knowledge and experience to create courses that help you provide the optimal outcomes for your clients.
Mary Warren
Founder
Listen to Dr. Warren discuss vision impairment from acquired brain injury on the Noggins and Neurons podcast
Dr. Mary Warren is an internationally recognized authority on rehabilitation of adults with vision impairment. As a clinician, educator and researcher, she has been a passionate advocate for defining a role for occupational therapy that reflects the profession’s unique skills in addressing the occupational needs of adults with vision impairment.
During her career Dr. Warren spearheaded efforts to establish and expand occupational therapy services in vision rehabilitation and ensure that occupational therapy practitioners were competent to provide services. After establishing one of the first outpatient medical programs to bill Medicare for vision rehabilitation services, Dr. Warren moved to the University of Alabama at Birmingham to create a graduate certificate degree in low vision rehabilitation. The program was the first to provide formal education to occupational therapists to prepare them to provide services to clients with vision impairment from age-related eye disease and acquired brain injury. Dr. Warren served as an associate professor and program director for the certificate program until retiring in 2018 and continues to teach as adjunct faculty.
Dr. Warren chaired the AOTA panel that developed specialty certification in low vision rehabilitation and represented AOTA on numerous ad hoc committees addressing issues in low vision rehabilitation. She was named a Fellow of the American Occupational Therapy Association in 2006 for her work in expanding vision rehabilitation as a practice area and in 2019, AOTA recognized her career long contributions to occupational therapy with the Award of Merit.
Much of Dr. Warren’s academic and research efforts have focused on ensuring occupational therapists are fully prepared to help their clients regain the ability to use their vision to complete occupations. Dr. Warren served as the guest editor and contributor for the first American Journal of Occupational Therapy special issue on low vision rehabilitation. She edited the first AOTA self-paced clinical course and co-edited an AOTA textbook on low vision rehabilitation-Occupational Therapy Interventions for Adults with low Vision. Dr. Warren has contributed chapters to several rehabilitation textbooks including a recurring chapter on evaluation and treatment of visual deficits after brain injury in Pedretti’s Occupational Therapy Practice Skills for Physical Dysfunction and a chapter on low vision Ways of Living, Intervention Strategies to Enable Participation (5th edition, 2020). Dr. Warren is the author of the Brain Injury Visual Assessment Battery for Adults (biVABA), a widely used occupational therapy assessment tool.
Dr. Warren’s teaching skill has been recognized with several awards including the Teaching Award from the Envision Foundation, the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Joseph Volker Award for Outstanding Faculty Member from the UAB School of Health Professions and Outstanding Educator Award from the Missouri Occupational Therapy Association.
Key Publications
Warren, M. (1993). A hierarchal model for evaluation and treatment of visual perceptual dysfunction in adult acquired brain injury, parts 1 and 2. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 47, 42-67.
Warren, M. (1990). Identification of visual scanning deficits in post-CVA patients. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 44, 391-399.
Warren, M., Moore, J., & Vogtle, L.K. (2008). Visual search performance of healthy adults on cancellation tests. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 62, 580-586.
Warren, M. (2009). A pilot study on activities of daily living limitations in adults with hemianopsia. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 63, 626-633.
Mennem, T. A., Warren, M. & Yuen, H.K. (2012). Preliminary validation of a vision-dependent activities of daily living instrument on adults with homonymous hemianopia. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 64(4) 478-482.
Blaylock, S.E., Warren, M., Yuen, H.K., DeCarlo, D. K. (2016). Validation of a reading assessment for persons with homonymous hemianopia or quadrantanopia. Archives of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, 97(9), 1515-1519.
Zemina, C., Warren, M., Yuen, H-Y (2018). Content validation: Revised self-report assessment of functional visual performance, American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 72. 7205205010p1-7205205010p7. doi:10.5014/ajot.2018.030197
Snow, M., Warren, M, Yuen, H-Y (2018). Construct validation: Revised self-report assessment of functional visual performance, American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 72, 7205205020p1-7205205020p8. doi:10.5014/ajot.2018.030205
We are a mom and pop company: Craig handles registration and Mary provides the lectures. We founded visAbilities in 1994 to provide education and resources to occupational therapists working with adults with vision impairment from acquired brain injury and age-related eye disease. Mary had been lecturing for 10 years on how vision impairment significantly impeded the client’s recovery from brain injury but few other continuing education courses addressed this important sensory function. We wanted to provide focused education to prepare clinicians prepare occupational therapists to provide effective evidence-based interventions to their clients with vision impairmen . The Abilities in our name comes from our desire to enable adults with vision impairment to resume independent and productive lives by training those who care for them. For over three decades, we have remained committed to providing affordable, up-to-date, practice-oriented, evidenced-based, high-quality continuing education and products to enable OTs to achieve optimal outcomes in their clients.
Contact Us
Email address: courses@visabilities.com
visAbilities Rehab Services, Inc.
4000 W 6th St, Ste B #295
Lawrence, KS 66049