GRANBY — Luka Azeuedo, who is just under 2 years old, squirms in the arms Alphabet Soup Childcare Center emplyee Casey Rougeau while she positions him to look into a small black machine playing bird sounds and flashing blue, green and red dots.

“Can you find the birdy?” Granby Lions Club member Steve Markow said to get Azeudo to look at the device in his hands.

The dazzling lights and happy nature sounds entice Azeudeo to stare into the portable vision screener for a few seconds, long enough for the device to check for six different vision problems: nearsightedness, farsightedness, blurred vision, eye misalignment, unequal pupil size and unequal refractive power.

Markow, a retired optometrist from South Hadley, glances at the eye screener he holds in front of Azeudo and announces the infant passed the six tests, which Rougeau celebrates with the child before bringing him back into the main room of Alphabet Soup for playtime.

This device is one of the few that can catch vision issues in a child as early as six months, said Markow. Human eye systems, specifically the ability to see with 20/20 vision and in three dimensions, develop the most between 6 months old and 6 years old, after which vision becomes very hard to correct. Roughly 10% of children in this demographic have a vision problem.

The importance of early vision correction is why the Granby Lions Club is visiting eight preschools in Granby and South Hadley over the course of two weeks, offering free eye screenings to about 400 children and some financial support for low-income families whose children require eye exams and glasses. So far, the organization has found half a dozen vision impairments during the first week of screening nearly 100 children.

“Our motto is we serve, and vision is an area that the Lions Club specifically focuses in on,” Markow said.

Lions Club Member Jim Pietras, who sits next to Markow in a darkened office at Alphabet Soup, said the Lions Club was first tasked to treat people’s vision by Helen Keller, an American author and educator who was blind and deaf, in 1925. The Lions Club of Western Massachusetts, a district division of the international service organization, once upheld this charge through the Eye Mobile, a portable eye testing facility, accompanied by a pancake breakfast.

“It’s just the service we’re doing for the community,” Pietras said. “We feel good about it, I think the preschools feel good about it, most parents feel good about it, and that’s what’s good.”

Yet when Markow joined the Granby Lions Club chapter after the South Hadley chapter disbanded a couple of years ago, he brought with him the idea to test local pre-school aged children using a portable eye scanning device.

“The screenings prior to this instrument have been very rudimentary, and with children nearly impossible to test because you need to get feedback and have them read an eye chart,” he said. “The beauty of this instrument is that it’s totally objective, you don’t need a response from the child, and it’s pretty sophisticated.”

The portable eye examiner, called the SPOT vision screener, works by shining a single beam of light in the patient’s eyes, which the eyes then reflect back into the machine. Markow explains the device can analyze the reflected light to determine the position of each eye, the pupil size and the retina’s ability to produce a clear image. If any of these measures are irregular for the child’s age, the machine prints a report with a recommendation for a full eye exam and corrective therapy.

“It’s all about early intervention,” Markow said. “That’s why it’s so important for the parents, when they do get a report from us that the child did not pass within the norms, that they act on it and go to the eye doctor.”

Markow adds that neither the SPOT screener nor the Lions Club collect any images or names of children who use the scanner, so no personal information goes beyond the parents and teachers.

Bobbi Rougeau, owner of Alphabet Soup, said she originally learned about the eye test eight years ago during the Ashfield Fair, where the Lions Club Association of Western Mass advertised the procedure at their booth. As a early childhood educator, she was instantly intrigued.

“It’s such a quick process and they can do babies as young as 6 months old which is great because I don’t know if they get tests that young,” she said.

When explaining the process and reasoning behind the vision screenings to parents, Rougeau often recounts a story of Lions Club members catching a discrepancy in the vision of a child under 3 years old. A couple weeks later, Rougeau heard a knock at the door by an unexpected visitor.

“We had the eye doctor’s assistant knock on my door, and thank me personally for doing the Lions Club eye exam because they have never seen a children’s vision so bad at such a young age,” she said. “We were so proud we were able to be a part of that diagnosis.”

For families who lack sufficient eye insurance or funds to cover eye exams and glasses, Markow and Pietras note that the Lions Club will offset the cost. While funds are limited, the Granby Lions Club sends a money to an emergency sight and hearing fund held by the Western Massachusetts delegation, and the South Hadley Lions Club used their remaining money to establish an account with the Community Foundation of Western Mass for vision prior to breaking up. Both accounts also accept donations from the public.

“My objective was to get into as many preschool facilities here in South Hadley and Granby, test as many kids as we can and just do our best,” Markow said.

Emilee Klein can be reached at eklein@gazettenet.com.