Welcome to EMVIA

If you or someone in your family has problems with vision, welcome. You are in the right place! We are Tucson's most comprehensive resource for people with visual impairments, their families, their friends. We are here to help.

EMVIA stands for Educating and Mentoring for the Visually Impaired Association. Our mission is to help visually impaired people and their families deal with the many issues they face. Whether you have a slight vision loss or total blindness, we are here to educate, mentor, and inform about ways in which you can manage and cope.

With all the resources, devices, and opportunities available today, vision loss is a manageable reality. We find, gather, and check pertinent and useful information, putting it together for your convenience and ease of access. You can do just about everything you could do with sight.

Our advisory board consists of 12 people running the gamut from career professionals in governmental services to trainers, to merchants, to citizens-at-large. Some are blind, some have low vision, some do not.

Our Personal Experience

Our mentor Mitzi Tharin began experiencing vision loss at the age of 21 and she is now totally blind. She has worked with different agencies dealing with vision loss issues and has been gainfully employed for over 21 years. One of the most difficult challenges she and her family have encountered has been a simple lack of knowledge of the many resources available to the individual and also to family and friends.

The EMVIA Information Collection

This site is divided into broad sections:

Mentoring discusses getting help from people who have gone through this sort of thing before.
Literacy is about staying connected to society all about us when the visual printed word becomes alien to us.
Gadgets is chock full of gizmos and do-dads that have been created or adjusted to help us do things in the sight-diminished world.
Mobility is a section concerned with our continuing to get around and to not sit at home.
Resources appear everywhere here but in this section we try to gather them all up and make some orderly sense of them all.
Recreation is dedicated to the idea of just having some fun.
The EMVIA Mall is a convenient source of visual aids. Look through it to get an idea of the huge range of devices.

This is now - and will always be - an ongoing project. We're always searching for new and updated information so check back regularly.

Click here for our links to:

Facebook | Twitter | Mitzi's Blog