Disability
Vision Disability by County — US Rankings
CDC PLACES 2023 · Age-adjusted prevalence · All 3,144 US counties
Vision disability is the share of adults who are blind or have serious difficulty seeing even with glasses. PLACES age-adjusts the estimate. After age adjustment, the variance across counties reflects diabetes prevalence (diabetic retinopathy), glaucoma management, and access to ophthalmology. The highest-prevalence counties often overlap with the diabetes belt — that connection is real, even if any one resident's vision loss has a different cause.
How this ranking is built
Source: CDC PLACES 2023 release. Methodology: BRFSS survey responses pooled across years, fitted with a small-area statistical model, age-adjusted to the 2000 US standard population. Confidence intervals (95%) are shown for each county — wider intervals indicate more uncertainty in the modeled estimate, typically driven by smaller populations.
Lowest Vision Disability Rates — Top 100 Counties
Counties with the lowest reported vision disability prevalence — these counties show the most favorable position on this measure.
Best 100 counties for Vision Disability.
Highest Vision Disability Rates — Bottom 100 CountiesCounties with the highest reported vision disability prevalence.
Worst 100 counties for Vision Disability.
What this ranking suggests
Vision rankings are most useful when read alongside the DIABETES ranking and the local primary-care density. Diabetic eye care is one of the clearest preventable causes of working-age vision loss in the US, and county-level outcomes track upstream diabetes management.
Methodology notes & limitations
Estimates are statistical model outputs, not direct measurements. Small counties have wider confidence intervals; treat narrow rank differences in those rows as within-noise. Counties where the underlying population is too small to support modeling are suppressed entirely (about 1% of US counties). All measures are age-adjusted to the 2000 US standard population. The PLACES dataset uses BRFSS self-reported data — self-report introduces known direction-of-bias in some measures (BMI is under-reported; binge drinking is under-reported), but the bias is roughly uniform across counties so ranking comparability is preserved. See the methodology page for full data-pipeline documentation.
Data source: CDC PLACES 2023 release. Measure ID: VISION.