Reading and Vision

It never would have occurred to me that there would ever be any kind of link between vision and reading ability. I say this as someone who is legally blind.

The physical requirements of reading for me, particularly as a young child, have at times been cumbersome - large print books, magnifiers, etc. When I try and read without those, my reading speed would slow to a crawl, but as long as I can see what I'm reading, I can read it. I never struggled with reading as a child. I've always been a very avid reader.

Of course, being unable to see what I was reading at all (where "see" is a relative term and could just as easily mean braille) I would never have learned to read, but that's more of an issue of lack of exposure to reading, not specifically a link between reading capability and visual acuity.

One thing that did come about as a result of my low vision with regards to reading, which (I think) helped me a great deal is that my dad read to me a lot. He recognized that reading for me was physically awkward to do, and so he read to me all the time, probably well past the age that a lot of kids are read to. I remember listening to him read books when I was 12yrs old.

Since he was the one doing the reading, he would read books with more sophisticated language than I might have been naturally exposed to in books at that age; books like "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", "Robinson Crusoe," etc. So I ended up getting exposed to a lot of language and a lot of literature. This further motivated me to keep reading more on my own and gave me the vocabulary to do so.