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UCL behavioural therapy transforms lives of stroke victims by helping them to read again

Read-Right is a ground-breaking online behavioural therapy developed by UCL researchers to help people whose sight has been damaged by stroke to learn to read again.

Read Right

Read-Right was developed by Professor Alex Leff (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience) to allow the therapeutic website to help people with Hemianopic Alexia to improve and test their reading ability from the comfort of their own homes.

Hemianopic Alexia damages a person's sight, usually after a stroke or brain injury, and results in the loss of half of a person's field of vision. This can make reading difficult and slow, resulting in some people giving up reading or even losing their jobs as they are unable to read at a sufficient pace.

Read-Right addresses this by improving the efficiency of readers’ eye movements. Users practice reading scrolling text which retrains their reading eye movements . The therapy has been shown to improve a person's ability to read normal text when used as part of a rehabilitation programme. Findings show that as little as seven to 14 hours of therapy over several weeks could make reading significantly faster for people with Hemianopic Alexia. 

The website, funded by the Stroke Association and National Institute for Health Research, offers a wide range of reading matter. This includes classic literature such as Sherlock Holmes to current fiction such as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and up-to-the-minute BBC news articles. 

As reading is an integral part of most people’s lives, Read-Right has transformed the lives of thousands of people across the world whom had thought they would not be able to read comfortably again. 

Meet the minds behind this discovery at the It's All Academic Festival on 5 October. 

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