Finding the Work-Around

My 12 year old son’s vision is bad. While the prescription on his glasses is mild, the double and sometimes triple vision makes everything he does into an incredible challenge.

This is what his vision looks like:

Now imagine a whole world that looks like this.

Could you do math if the numbers looked like that? How long would it take for you to read a book? This is the battle we fight every day. It tries our patience and is endlessly frustrating. His vision makes it difficult for him to remember the thing she reads unless he goes slowly, reads them out loud, and reads each sentence through at least three times. Sentence by sentence, he slowly has to memorize each paragraph and then mentally recite them to himself in order to comprehend what he has read. It is exhausting for him. He ends the school days wrung out and looking as if he needs a nap. 

We had tried all the alternatives we could think of, we just needed a way to work around the fact that there are times when he just can’t look and see at the same time any more. I read the chapters to him. It worked, but he was determined to be independent and do it himself. He would read them out loud to me, but this was time prohibitive as a single chapter in his literature book could take over two hours for him to power his way through. Add in his other lessons and the fact that I had to teach his siblings too, and there is no way that he can read it all to me. There is no way that I can listen for that long. We tried books on tape, but ran into his determination to do be independent again. We tried to blend reading and listening to audiobooks, but it was cumbersome and frustrating for both of us.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday I learned that Amazon offers an audiobook/e-book combination on many of their titles. I was very skeptical that it would work, but we ordered The Hobbit anyway. It works like a charm. He was on Chapter 4 of the book when I switched him over to the Kindle version on my iPad. He read it in his own awkward way for three or four pages before he began rubbing his eyes and complaining that they were bothering him. When that happened, I book marked the exact place in the chapter where he had stopped and switched over to the Audibles app and plugged in the earphones. The reader picked up and began reading on the very next sentence. There were no gaps in the reading and no searching through the files to find his place. He sighed in contentment and sank into the couch with his eyes closed…listening. After 15 minutes, he paused the reader and asked to read it himself again. (He really does prefer it that way.) I held my breath and switched back to the Kindle and was very impressed to see that it had kept up with where he was. The book was open to the correct place with a highlight marking the last word that was read. 

He was overjoyed and so was I. Here at last was a workable solution. You see, I’ve been worrying about this for years. I had no idea what we were going to do as he got into the upper grades. He’s smart enough to comprehend the books, but unable to read at the same level. I was stymied about how to handle a boy who could understand The Iliad, but got worn out reading anything longer than Dr Seuss. 

I’m breathing easier tonight because there is a solution at last. It’s not perfect as not all the books he needs are available in this format, but it is definitely a good beginning. Costing only an additional $1-5 a book, it seems like a bargain to me. Which is why I’m sharing it with you. There are many of us who have children for whom reading is difficult and a regular struggle. If you’re like me and wonder how to help them, this might be one solution. All I know is that I’m incredibly thankful to be living in a time where the books can take over reading when your eyes are too tired to keep going. What a boon this is to our family. What a relief it is to me.



***I was not compensated in any way by Amazon or Kindle. They don’t even know I’m endorsing them. I’m doing it anyway because this is great and I want the whole world to know that it exists!