Three and a half years ago, when I “lost” my second eye, I – an avid reader – had 30 pages left to read in a mystery novel. Not being able to see well enough to read that last, paltry 30 pages was frustrating and heartbreaking. Therefore, when a reader/member recently posted in another forum how she had lost the ability to read and was badly shaken, I got it. Oh, yeah; I got it.
This reader/member, although shaken, reported she was going to try eccentric viewing. Hallelujah! First of all, I would like to thank her for validating our efforts here. I am thinking she heard it here first and I am proud and honored to have passed on some valuable and helpful information. Second of all, I want to applaud her for continuing to fight.
There are ways to cope and adapt to vision loss and eccentric viewing is one of them.
Third thing I want to do here is talk again about eccentric viewing. If you are a latecomer to this blog/group or if you forget, let me start by defining eccentric viewing. In a nutshell, eccentric viewing is enlisting a part of your peripheral retina to do the jobs your macula used to do. One of these jobs is reading.
Now reading with eccentric viewing ain’t “pretty”. It involves practice and will never be as efficient as reading with your fovea. An analogy might be turning a screw with a butter knife or pounding a nail with a rock. The job gets done but it is slower and there are more failed attempts. However, some success is generally better than no success.
The first step is to find your preferred reading locus, affectionately referred to as your “sweet spot”. This is different for everyone and may require some searching and experimentation. The one I have been using is below my fovea. It works pretty well when I am able to work in close and be reclined – such as now when I am hanging out in bed typing on my iPad. It has not been working so well recently when I am, for example, trying to read the eye chart for the study. That requires me to lean my head back and I have been getting a crick in my neck. Consequently I have been searching for a spot more in the horizontal plane. Play around and find a place that you like.
How do you play around to find it? Nancy Parkin- Bashizi in The Skill of Eccentric Viewing suggests drawing a clock with a star in the middle. Focusing on the star, see which number is the clearest. That may be your sweet spot for reading
Don’t be frustrated if you keep sliding off your sweet spot. Your brain has spent a life time putting your fovea on what you want to see. It is natural for it to keep trying to do that. Keep moving your focus back. Take it from me, things you are trying to see with eccentric viewing can be darn slippery! I will get them fairly well in focus for a split second but then my eye just jumps away. I know I saw something but it did not “compute”.
This knowing what you are looking at gets better with practice as your brain learns to adapt. I saw an article about how your brain recruits parts of the visual cortex that normally handle peripheral vision tasks to take over the reading tasks. If I can find it again I can write a page about that.
Another thing to do is practice keeping your eye still and moving the paper. Many of the articles I skimmed suggested using an iPad or other brand of tablet so you can scroll the words past your eyes instead of moving your eyes across and down the page. Once you get that sweet spot on the page, you don’t want to lose it! [Lin/Linda: this technique actually has a name: ‘steady eye strategy.’ Here’s a good video demonstrating it.]
Does eccentric viewing work? Yeah. Sort of. I can read short, newspaper articles without magnification if I put my mind to it. I am slow and make more mistakes than I would like but the job gets done. I can read. And, in the end, I guess that is all that matters
Written September 28th, 2019