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Reading is a key function in everyday life and its rehabilitation in low vision patients is of high priority. Standardized assessment of reading performance is necessary with the option of repeated measurements based on different, but equivalent texts within one language and with the option to perform international multi-language studies. The aim was to develop texts in different languages in order to provide this tool for a wide range of countries and users to allow international multi-language studies in the future.
The International Reading Speed Texts (IResT) consists of paragraphs of text (approx. 130 words per text) - according to the everyday life reading demands with the same difficulty, content and linguistic characteristics in the different languages. It consists of a set of ten equivalent texts in each language for repeated measurements and international studies and was already evaluated in 425 normal young subjects.
The main areas of application cover for clinical and scientific use, when quantitative assessment of reading speed is required:
Whereas well designed texts with single sentences for measuring reading acuity and critical print size have been available, such as MN-Read or Radner`s charts, there were no standardized texts using paragraphs. A whole paragraph of text is preferable to a single sentence − for more accurate speed measurement and judgement of fluency and mistakes.
Additionally, reading paragraphs in newspaper print is the common everyday demand. Therefore, we developed in a previous European Research Project (AMD-READ) such texts in 6 different languages The development of 11 more languages was supported by Alcon® . The 2nd edition of IReST with altogether 17 languages will be available under sba[at]med.uni-tuebingen.de
Prof. Dr. med. S. Trauzettel-Klosinski
Center of Ophthalmology
Low Vision Clinic and Research Lab
University of Tuebingen
Schleichstrasse 12-16
D-72076 Tuebingen
Germany
Tel.: +49-(0)7071-29-84787
Fax.: +49-(0)7071-29-5164
E-mail: sba[at]med.uni-tuebingen.de