The following story was featured as a case for study for an Internet seminar called Learning Problems: The Visual Connection. For more information, please go to http://www.digevent.com/events/client/COVD/02-01-31_visual/index.asp.
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Eric is a teenager and came for an evaluation when he was in the eighth grade. His reading was so difficult that his mom did most of the reading for him. He was diagnosed as dyslexic. The visual evaluation showed that he had a severe eye tracking problem. Eric received glasses for reading and optometric vision therapy to develop eye tracking skills. He wrote the following after 14 sessions of vision therapy:

Vision therapy, well. What can I say? It has been the best thing that has ever happened to me. When I first started vision therapy every word I saw was scrambled. When I blinked or looked away the word re-scrambled. I never saw a word the same in one sitting. Each time I looked at it, it changed. For example, a simple word like "this" has 24 different combinations (this, tish, tshi, tsih, this this this, hits, hsti, hsit, htsi, hist, iths, ihts, ihst, itsh, isth, isht, sthi, shti, stih, shit, sith, siht). Obviously, this made reading very difficult for me. I would do the best I could buy trying to memorize all the letter combinations of two, three and four letter words and give by best guess on the rest. So, vision therapy has been pretty much of a miracle for my family and me.

I guess what I am trying to say is that, before I started vision therapy I had no chance of reading or doing any school work by myself and now I am going away with a strong chance of learning to read and being able to do school work by myself.

Signed,
Eric