A direct comparison of the eye movements of a good and poor reader. Both dyslexia support professionals in the UK

Today we took two colleagues and put them on the eye tracker using the same text. 

One was a ‘self-confessed’ good reader. The other was a self-confessed dyslexic reader. The two eye traces are below.

The fixations for both took about the same time, around 280 milliseconds.

The dyslexic colleague, was processing far fewer characters per fixation than the good reader and the right eye was being suppressed, although the optician had said that there was no optical problem with it.

I did then optimise the screen settings for him.  The last graph shows the poor reader reading for the same time period on equivalent text with the same font size.

The reading speed of the dyslexic/poor reader increased from 180 wpm to 418 words per minute.

The non dyslexic colleague was reading at.  474 words per minute on a default setting.

The minimal saccades for the poor reader's eye movements on default would likely give rise to muscle tone build up in the oculo motor muscles reducing eye motility.and reddening of the eyes,