Okay, I lied. Last time I promised that we’d go over the rest of the five senses in my next blog piece, but I realized the vision section is so large, we need to continue to focus on that — plus give you your Action Plan! — before we march forward.
So, let me tell you something about myself that probably won’t surprise you if you’ve been reading this blog for a while. You know I’m an autism mom, a clinician with a focus on autism health, plus I’m an author and a speaker who focuses on the health issues of the autism spectrum.
I’ve been working with autistic children and adults for a long time. There is autism up my family tree and down. I’m not autistic myself, but I have some of the same challenges, and obviously, I’m the mothership, lol. I have written about autism, presented about autism at conferences, and I probably think about autism in my sleep.
Regarding our current topic, it hits home for this girl because I really have some visual sensory issues going on.
Not dramatically. Not in a way that’s ever stopped me from functioning. But I know what it feels like when a store’s fluorescent lighting starts to feel like something is drilling behind my eyes. I know the particular misery of driving into a low winter sun with no visor angle that actually helps. And I know what it’s like when an oncoming driver refuses to dim their high beams and you spend the next quarter mile seeing spots and quietly losing your mind.
So when I say that visual overstimulation is a real driving challenge — I’m not saying it from a textbook. I’m saying it from experience. And I’m saying it because it comes up with the autistic teens and adults I work with, and it doesn’t get nearly enough airtime in driving conversations.
Here’s Your Action Plan for Vision
1. Autistic drivers tend to fix their gaze more centrally1,2 — focused straight ahead — and scan the periphery less than neurotypical drivers. The visual system is working hard to manage what’s coming in, and the result is a narrower focus of attention. The road directly in front of you gets a lot of coverage. The edges, the mirrors, the guy merging from the right — not as much.
If this is you, this means you can work on it deliberately. During low-stakes drives, make a habit of consciously checking mirrors and side zones at regular intervals. Some drivers build this into a quiet verbal routine — a little internal script that eventually becomes automatic. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. Just intentional. Build that habit early on and you’ll be a safer driver.
Now let’s talk about light3 because this is where I hear the most complaints.
2. 
Glare is the big one. Polarized sunglasses are the single easiest upgrade most people never make. They cut glare from wet roads, oncoming headlights, and that brutal low-angle sun dramatically better than regular tinted lenses. If you wear prescription glasses, anti-reflective coating is worth every penny.
Extendable clip-on sun visor extenders that attach to existing visors are inexpensive and genuinely helpful for low-angle sun situations.
3. For nighttime driving, yellow-tinted night driving glasses reduce the scatter from oncoming high beams — they don’t fix the problem completely, but they make it more manageable.
(It’s worth noting they also reduce overall light transmission, which can be a tradeoff on very dark roads. You’ll find they work better in suburban/urban environments with ambient light than on unlit rural roads.)
4. Speaking of high beams — if they’re a consistent nightmare for you, I want you to steal a strategy from an autistic driver I read about who dealt with this exact issue. She didn’t like nighttime glasses. So instead she developed a mental script: when someone’s high beams hit, she tells herself to ignore the light source and redirect focus to the lane markings.
I wouldn’t want readers interpreting that as stare at the road markings while ignoring everything else. So here’s a take on her advice that lays it out a bit more clearly:
- Don’t stare directly into the headlights.
- Keep your gaze oriented toward the right side of your lane/road edge, while maintaining awareness of traffic.
- Reduce speed if visibility is compromised.
- If you can’t see well enough to drive safely, pull over.
- Don’t use sunglasses that make it harder to see the road at night.
5. Here’s tip that’s genuinely useful:
At night, some drivers are overwhelmed by the contrast between a dark road and a brightly illuminated dashboard/infotainment screen. I know that I’m one of those drivers! The dashboard lights seem to bore a hole in the back of my eyes and become truly distracting if I forgot to dim them before it got dark outside.
Find the knob or control that reduces instrument-panel brightness and put the infotainment display into a dim/night mode. You may have to look in your car’s manual to find it.
Make the adjustment while you’re still sitting in the driveway if you’re starting your trip at night. Or, if you suddenly realize the lights on the console are boring a hole in your eyes because it’s getting dark outside, pull over and dim them as soon as you realize it.
6. Tinted windows are worth considering too, especially if light sensitivity is significant. Just check your state’s legal tint limits before you go too dark — they vary, and getting pulled over for your window tint is an annoying way to spend an afternoon.
7. 
One thing people never think about: keep your windshield clean. I mean really clean. A dirty windshield scatters light in every direction and turns normal driving into a sensory obstacle course, especially at night or in rain. This costs you nothing except five minutes and some glass cleaner. There seems to be some sort of gray film that builds up on the INSIDE of the windshield, even in cars where no one ever smokes. You’ve probably never noticed it, but trust me, take a swipe at the inside of your windshield with a dry napkin and you’ll never be able to unsee it again, ha ha.
That film is real and it’s genuinely gross when you find out what it’s made of.
It’s a combination of several things. The biggest contributor is a process called off-gassing — the plastics, vinyl, foam, and synthetic materials inside your car slowly release volatile organic compounds (VOCs) as they break down, especially when the car heats up in the sun. Those compounds drift through the interior air and deposit on the nearest cool, flat surface, which is usually the inside of the windshield. (This is the same phenomenon responsible for that “new car smell” — basically your car is slowly sweating chemicals onto your windshield. Less charming when you think about it that way.)
The other contributors are skin particles, hair, dust, and general airborne debris that circulates through the HVAC system and lands on the glass. If anyone in the car uses any kind of product — hairspray, air freshener, hand lotion — those aerosolize and add to the film. Cooking smells that travel with you. Even your own breath contributes moisture and particles over time.
The film is oilier than it looks, which is why wiping it with a dry cloth smears it rather than removes it. It also has a static charge that attracts more particles, so once it starts it accelerates.
A practical note that is relevant to the visual section of this chapter: that film scatters light. At night, oncoming headlights hit that residue and diffuse across the entire windshield surface, which significantly worsens glare. For someone with visual light sensitivity, a dirty windshield isn’t just an annoyance — it’s a meaningful sensory and safety issue. Cleaning the inside of the windshield with a proper glass cleaner, not just a dry wipe, makes a more noticeable difference to nighttime driving than most people expect.
8. 
And while we’re cleaning things, don’t forget the windshield wipers. Worn wipers leave a microscopic film and streaks that become spectacularly obvious when headlights hit them at night. If they turn rain into a smeary Jackson Pollock painting, it’s time for new ones.
9. Clean your headlights, too. If they’ve grown foggy due to age, there are products in the car aisle at Walmart, etc. that will clear them up.
10 Make sure your headlights are angled at the road. One time when I had a new car, I thought the headlights were particularly dim and annoying. It took a few weeks for me to realize there was a control knob to the left of the steering wheel that controlled the tilt of the headlights, and mine were aimed too low to help me see well at night! Duh!
11. Inside the car, strip out visual clutter. Anything hanging from the mirror, anything parked on the dashboard — gone. For example, I can’t tolerate papers up on the dashboard because they create a reflection on the windshield that I can’t tune out. Your visual field while driving should be as simple as you can make it.
12. 
Here’s another thing that helps more than people expect: use GPS on every drive, even routes you know well. Every bit of mental energy you free up from route-planning is energy available for watching the road. Some navigation apps also let you simplify the map display, which reduces the visual business on the screen itself.
13. And build your driving schedule around your sensory tolerance where you can. Rush hour, construction zones, heavy rain — all of these dramatically increase visual load.
Choose when to drive: I’ve never had great night vison myself, and the glare of even low-beam headlights is excruciating for me. Now that I’m older and wiser, I plan on getting home before dark and I just avoid that painfulness altogether.
If you’re still building confidence behind the wheel, practice during off-peak hours in familiar areas first. Daylight before nighttime. Quiet roads before highways.
14. 
One more thing: know your early warning signs before they escalate. Squinting, tension behind the eyes, the feeling that you can’t quite track everything at once — if you feel visually overwhelmed while driving, find a safe place to pull over and give yourself a few minutes before you get back into traffic.
15. If you haven’t had a full eye exam recently, get one — with a developmental optometrist — and mention driving specifically when you’re there. Some visual processing differences that are more common in autistic people, including contrast sensitivity and motion perception, are measurable and worth knowing about.
16. An occupational therapist trained in driver rehabilitation can also look at visual scanning as part of a broader driving evaluation, which is worth pursuing if visual challenges are significant for you.
17. Know when not to drive. One of the most useful lessons in an action plan for autistic drivers isn’t just how to compensate; it’s how to recognize when compensation isn’t enough. If you’re exhausted, visually overloaded, sick, dealing with a migraine, or finding yourself unable to comfortably process what’s happening around you, there’s no prize for pushing through.
Your visual system is doing a lot of work every time you get behind the wheel. Understanding what it’s doing — and giving it a little help — makes that job easier.
Want to See the Research?
- The visual search patterns of drivers with Autism Spectrum Disorders in complex driving scenarios Journal of Transport & Health Volume 14, September 2019, 100597 Derserri Yan Ting Chee, HoeChung Yeung Lee, Ann-Helen Patomella, Torbjörn Falkmer
- Scoping Review of the Driving Behaviour of and Driver Training Programs for People on the Autism Spectrum. Behav Neurol. 2018 Aug 28;2018:6842306. doi: 10.1155/2018/6842306. PMID: 30245750; PMCID: PMC6136574. Wilson NJ, Lee HC, Vaz S, Vindin P, Cordier R.
- Light Sensitivity and Autism Spectrum Disorder – TheraSpecs