Reading Speed

In about 2 months, I will have an anniversary. The end of January 2016 was when I “lost” the central vision in my second eye. January 2021 will be 5 years.

Routine

Most of that 5 years have contained a lot of repetition. I have to admit, in my semi-boring life, I do many things over and over. Repetition leads to over-learning which leads to success.

Consequently, there is little in my life to remind me of the impact of my vision loss. No, really. I don’t have the effects of my central vision loss constantly shoved in my face. In fact, it is hardly ever. Please note the word “hardly”.

Keeping up with current events

Recently, along with a good percentage of the world, I have become obsessed with the 2020 elections. I use those "aA" symbols in the upper right-hand top to make the article big and I use my eccentric viewing to read. The problem comes when I want to watch a video.

You may have noticed a number of these videos are not narrated with speech. They have captions. I get about halfway through a caption and it disappears! Good grief! They have obviously decided that the average reader can digest the caption in that amount of time.

It is also obvious that my reading speed these days does not even begin to come up to that standard. How humiliating! And frustrating; don’t forget frustrating.

Macular degeneration and reading speed

Even though my usual life does not point out my deficits on a daily basis – and I sort of like it that way. Ignorance can be bliss – a new experience like this can really make me aware of them. Namely, I have become a SLOW reader. The girl who could devour 300 page books in a day is no more.

Just how slow has age-related macular degeneration made me? No definitive answer there but I know I am now below average. Probably well below average given that I finish one sentence out of 2 or 3 before they disappear.

The numbers

The Perkins School quoted a which study found students with visual impairments are generally 1.5 to 2 times slower than normally sighted peers. That literally sounds like my speed.¹

The article goes on to talk about the benefits of something they call Audio-Supported Reading. This sounds suspiciously like what I do when I have a professional text in print and follow along with the pdf being read by the text-to-speech app. The Perkins article suggests Audio-Supported Reading allows for the improvement in print reading skills in young people. Not my problem.¹

If I could see, I assure you I could read... well. I use it as a way to move more quickly through the text and aid my comprehension. However, I don’t see following along speed as the same as reading speed. Not quite the answer, I would say.

What can we do?

So what is the answer to this? Of course, we have the “usual suspects” such as print size, contrast and spacing as being helpful. One study takes us back to our old friend the PLR, preferred retinal locus or “sweet spot”, eccentric vision and “perceptual training”. Unfortunately, generalization of treatment effects to real life were not studied and/or demonstrated in the study.²

So, it would seem we are back to magnification, contrast and eccentric viewing if we want to read. And my slow speed? I think I will just avoid those videos with the captions. Ignorance can be bliss.