Teaching Home Cleaning Skills to a Blind Client

Abstract

Four household cleaning tasks were taught to a blind woman of average intelligence using procedures to compensate for her blindness. General and specific task analyses were compared as assessment techniques for cleaning a bathroom mirror, a patio door, and a bathtub (Experiment 1) and sweeping a floor (Experiment 2). A multiple baseline across responses (Experiment 1) and an AB experimental design with follow-up (Experiment 2) were used to evaluate the efficacy of training. The results showed that the client rapidly acquired the necessary skills and was able to generalize them to unfamiliar objects and to retain them. The research not only suggests a model for training blind clients in household maintenance skills, but also has implications for task analysis.