Vision, Reading Difficulties and Visual Stress

This book provides an overview of the research surrounding the relevance of visual factors for those who struggle with reading. Visual interventions that have been advocated as helping with reading include spectacles that simply correct refractive errors (e.g., long-sightedness), coloured overlays (sheets placed on the page) and coloured lenses, vision therapy, and computer games. This book explains the rationale behind these interventions and discusses the evidence supporting them. Clear advice is given in plain English to those wondering if these interventions will be helpful.

Vision, Reading Difficulties, and Visual Stress, 3rd Edition is a fully revised edition that draws together disparate research findings in a range of neurological disorders where vision is compromised by cortical hyperexcitability. Optometrists, orthoptists, ophthalmologists, educational psychologists, teachers, and vision scientists will find this book to be an interesting resource as well as students in these disciplines and parents of children who struggle with reading.

1. Introduction.- 2. Refractive Errors And Ocular Health.- 3. Binocular Vision And Accommodative Anomalies.- 4. Controversial Vision Therapies.- 5. Magnocellular Theories..- 6. Coloured Filters – 7. Early Studies.- 8. Do Coloured Filters Work?.- 9. How Do Coloured Filters Work?.- 10. Coloured Filters: Clinical Tools.

Professor Wilkins undertook his PhD from Sussex University, spent two years post doctorate at the Montreal Neurological Institute and then joined the MRC Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge until he took a chair at the University of Essex in 1997 and become Emeritus Professor in 2015. 

Professor Evans undertook a PhD from Aston University and for 30 years was Director of Research at the Institute of Optometry in London. He is currently Visiting Professor to City, University of London and to London South Bank University.