Reading and Visual Health Dossier: A Challenge for the Future?
Reading is one of the most sophisticated human activities—and one of the most threatened. By 2025, the French will read for shorter periods, less deeply, and with increasingly fragmented concentration. Yet, research on the links between reading and visual health has never been so abundant. Between new data on oculomotor skills, the ongoing debate on dyslexia, the effects of screens on attention, and the divide between readers and non-readers, the subject has become considerably more complex since our article on the topic in 2022. Here is the current state of affairs.
Reading and Visual Health: What the Recent Figures Say
The most recent data paints a more nuanced picture. According to the Sofia/SNE/SGDL 2026 barometer, 79% of French people aged 15 to 80 will have read at least one book by 2025 , compared to 74% in 2023. Paradoxically, this increase is driven by "light readers" (fewer than 5 books per year) and the rise of audiobooks , whose market share has doubled from 8% to 16%. "Heavy readers" (more than 20 books per year), however, are losing momentum: their share of print reading has fallen from 22% to 15%.
Among young people, the situation is more worrying.
According to the CNL/Ipsos 2024 study, 48% of readers do something else on a screen while they read. This figure rises to 69% among 16-19 year olds . Another finding: 20% of leisure readers read for less than 15 minutes without interruption . Deep, sustained, and immersive reading has become a rare skill… almost an act of resistance! A national campaign launched in the summer of 2025 — " Turn off your phone. Turn on your brain " — even publicly acknowledged this to bring the complex link between reading and eye health to the forefront.
Do you know what the eye really does when we read?
Reading is not the same as seeing: reading mobilizes a constellation of visual functions that go far beyond simple acuity. Binocular acuity at close range, sensitivity to contrasts, integrity of the visual field, and above all, oculomotor skills .
In practical terms, reading involves a series of microsaccades—rapid, precise eye movements from one syllable to the next—interspersed with foveal fixations, which are pauses of a few hundred milliseconds during which the brain processes the information. To move from one line to the next, larger saccades and vergence movements (convergence/divergence of the two eyes) come into play. It's a meticulously orchestrated ballet that the brain performs with extraordinary precision, at a rate of several hundred occurrences per minute.
Contrast sensitivity also plays a direct role: patients with AMD or cataracts experience marked difficulties reading, especially printed text on low-contrast backgrounds — an often ignored signal that may indicate early visual impairment.
Dyslexia and reading: the scientific debate remains open
The relationship between oculomotor disorders and dyslexia remains one of the most hotly debated topics in neurovisual research. Approximately 10% of school-aged children are affected by dyslexia , and while the linguistic aspect dominates the French scientific debate, an international meta-analysis published in 2024 reignited the controversy by documenting measurable visual motor deficits in dyslexic children and adolescents, compared to their peers of the same age.
What researchers are observing convergently: dyslexic children exhibit saccades with longer latencies, reduced accuracy and a lower convergence capacity than non-dyslexic children.
This does not mechanically cause dyslexia—but it complicates and worsens it by increasing visual and cognitive fatigue. Orthoptic rehabilitation, in this context, proves to be a valuable complement, not a miracle cure.
The debate remains open, and this is precisely where orthoptists and opticians have a monitoring role to play…
Are screens the real enemies of deep reading?
This is the great question of our time, and the answer is not simple.
What neuroscience is showing with increasing clarity is that repeated use of screens massively demands captured attention — reflexive, automatic, fragmented — at the expense of sustained attention , the kind required for deep reading.
According to neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf , fast and fragmented digital reading leads to a decline in empathy, in-depth comprehension, and critical reasoning. The brain gets used to "skimming" rather than immersing itself.
This shift has direct repercussions on visual health: ocular convergence is severely strained by hours of close screen use, dry eyes worsen with reduced blinking, and eye strain due to overuse of accommodation increases. These are all reasons for consultation that an optician or orthoptist can anticipate and address.
Visual acuity, necessary but not sufficient
One last thing deserves to be said, and it goes against a persistent misconception: good vision is not enough to read well.
The case of blind readers reading Braille is the most striking demonstration of this: in these patients, reading activates the visual cortex of the brain, proof that reading is above all a cerebral matter.
And the phenomenon of speed reading confirms this in its own way: the French champion, Mohamed Koussa, reads more than 900 words per minute (compared to 250 on average nationally) not thanks to superior acuity, but thanks to brain training to scan words in blocks, in wide and precise saccades.
Reading engages ocular proprioception—the brain's ability to know the precise position of the eyeballs in space thanks to the six extraocular muscles—to coordinate saccades toward what researchers call the "center of gravity of the word." This mechanism improves with practice, meaning that encouraging regular reading is also, biologically, a way to strengthen the visual system.
Reading and Visual Health: What this means for vision professionals
The reading crisis is not just a cultural problem. It is a visual and cognitive health issue, directly within the scope of practice of orthoptists and opticians. Screening for oculomotor disorders in children, supporting patients with convergence difficulties, raising awareness about the effects of screens, offering reading glasses, and recommending regular breaks: these are all preventative measures that fall within the expanded role that the optical sector is now rightfully claiming.
Reading trains your eyes as much as your brain. And vice versa!
Featured image credits: photos on Pexels by Vanja Lazic and Efrem Efre
