VI Labs is a space for creative and curious qualified teachers of visual impairment who want to collaborate, share ideas, and build tools that make a genuine difference to practice.

The platform was built by Dan Downes, a practising QTVI and PhD researcher, out of a simple frustration: the tools available to VI professionals haven't kept pace with our understanding of visual impairment and CVI. Assessment approaches still rely on photocopied sheets and Word documents. Practitioners develop brilliant ideas in isolation and rarely get the chance to share them. We meet once a year at a conference, feel inspired, and then go back to working alone.

VI Labs exists to change that.

The community is at the heart of the platform — a space where practitioners can discuss what's working, challenge ideas, share resources, and shape what gets built next. The tools grow from that collaboration: visual impairment simulations, CVI-informed reading tools, and new approaches to assessment, all designed by a practitioner for practitioners and available on any device.

VI Labs is not a membership body or a representative organisation. It is a workshop — a place where practitioners who care about their craft come to build, test, and refine the things that help them do better work for the children and young people they support.

The platform is built on a commitment to keep costs as low as possible. There are real expenses involved in running and developing VI Labs, and subscriptions reflect those costs rather than a commercial ambition. This project exists because the work matters.