Determining the incidence of visual impairment in elderly persons (>60 years) is one of the objectives of the NESTOR subprogram GLAS: “Functional Status and Need for Care”. For this purpose we designed a self-report questionnaire with 13 questions concerning day-to-day life such as “Can you see approaching bicycles and cars in the street?”, “Can you read numbers in a phone book?”, etc., and a set of screening techniques to measure visual acuity, edge contrast sensitivity, disability glare, near reading acuity, macular light sensitivity and quadrant visual field defects to test different aspects of visual functioning.

The results obtained with the screening tests are compared with the results of the self-report questionnaire. A validated self-report questionnaire will be a simple but adequate instrument in future studies and we believe that it will be helpful in the intake of visually impaired persons for rehabilitation programmes.