Meares-Irlen Syndrome

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I've been unofficially diagnosed with Meares-Irlen Syndrome. Does anyone else have this here? I find reading black text upon white difficult and have an overlay for books (I will hopefully be getting tinted glasses for reading soon) and screen tintng software on my laptop

My son was assessed for this on Wednesday last week and I got a letter today which says that his screening "appears positive" for Meares-Irlen. He's been prescribed rose tinted spectacles!

He hasn't been using overlays, but did have green tinted lenses before which were prescribed a year ago by another optician. I wasn't particularly impressed by that guy, as he was a bit of a "showman", pretty patronising and didn't answer any of my questions properly. This time we went to the Visual Stress Clinic at a local university which was much better. She got my son to read out sequences of random words without any lenses and with different coloured lenses. My son has always been a good reader, but there was a marked difference in his reading with and without the coloured lenses. The optician timed his reading and he could read more words aloud, with less stumbling and fewer errors with the rose lenses.

He already has glasses so the coloured tint is going to be added to them.

Not I, I think it's an interesting *disorder*, though.

I have serious difficulties with CAPTCHAs because of the black/white thing that you describe but it doesn't bother me in books or magazines.. The way the letters and colors go together on those effing things damn near sends me into state of delirium =X

I also have issues with colors and patterns in general. I do need to have things finely tuned to my specifications on my desktop and browser, certain colors and layouts make me very edgy and I don't even like visiting poorly designed or garish sites, I just can't process the information.

I wonder if this at all related to dyslexia or stems from the same sort of processing difficulties. I'm hyperlexic if anything, I was never labeled as such to my knowledge but i had a college reading level in second grade and have always been obsessed with books. i do feel like i think like a dyslexic/dyscaluliac person is some ways, though. It's probably just all related to autism and ADHD.

Yeah, about 15 or so years ago.

Ironically, I don't need the filters for reading, though. I do see the bright "rivers" down the page, and letters jumping around (and shimmering of venetian binds and such), but for me for reading it tends to calm down enough not to be a big problem. But I do find the tinted glasses useful for driving, and for generally being out of the house (grocery store, pharmacy, etc). The main reasons being it reduces visual overload some, helps with 3-D vision, and lets me see things more as integrated wholes rather than disconnect pieces. I'm not sure how to describe that last thing very well.

My only complaint about the Irlen people is that the exam (15 years ago) was expensive.

Diagnosed with it when I was about 17. I'm not sure I can separate it out as neatly as it claims to be separated out, from my particular variant on autism though. Reading is the least of my visual problems though, I've always disliked the extreme emphasis on reading. (And the Irlen Institute's attempts to monopolize the production of the lenses.)

Thank you for the replies. I live in London and I get income-based employment and support allowance (ie benefits) which paid for part of the eye exam. Also, I will be applying for disabled students allowance (for uni) which will completely cover the costs for tinted glasses

I get furriness and shimmering around black on white, but the worst bit is the eye strain. I have photosensitivity as well so I have to lower the contrast on everything

Oh, and also, I've learned that at least some of what I'd attributed to this, turned out to be quite possibly an optical migraine effect. (Not all migraines have pain. Optical migraines run in my family. I get both optical migraines and classic migraine with aura, among many other migraine effects. The word "migraine" is like the word "seizure" in that it can cause many different effects that don't look at all similar.)

For instance, I see shimmering colored dots in the air, water-like visual distortions, macropsia, micropsia, something that looks almost like rain falling, "clouds" of small colored shining particles, streaking shiny things, tiled patterns (like if I looked at a bush it might tile across my visual field), and other things like that. When I was diagnosed, some of those were blamed on Irlen syndrome, but later on a person I know with similar optical issues got diagnosed as having constant optical migraines.

I also see things in fragments. They seem to be constantly shaking or moving around. When I was younger, I played with these perceptions like they were toys, it didn't bother me, it was even sometimes fun. When I was sixteen, I became capable of motion sickness. Ever since then, when I traveled to a new enough place, I would become violently ill in a way that a friend said she'd never seen in someone who wasn't drunk. It took a long time (and help from others) before I correlated the illness with my visual problems combined with being in new places. But basically in old places, the familiarity helps me compensate, but in new places I rapidly get "seasick" from all the movement and the onslaught of information. (I have nausea meds now, which help a lot with this.)

I have no automatic depth perception and have compensated by using visual and kinesthetic cues. I was later diagnosed with an eye-muscle disorder called exotropia, where my eyes turn outward slightly. They prescribed prism lenses to correct this and I now have perfect depth perception, which has taken a good deal of getting used to. When I wore Irlen lenses I had something in between my current depth perception and a total lack of it.

Additionally, I have trouble processing what I see. I don't differentiate it into categories the way most people do. I don't see "a table", I see the shape, color, visual texture, shininess, and so on, and it isn't a "separate object" to me from anything around it. I have this trouble with most of my other senses too, but visually it's the worst of any of them. I think that has to do with a deeper-level processing issue (which has its own rewards as well as difficulties, so I don't necessarily want to change it).

Meanwhile my right eye has a number of intermittent problems like vertical double vision that may be entirely eye-based (I'm getting checked out for it soon).

As far as reading goes, I see the "rivers", the letters shake, they can get halos, they can get moving dots going around them, and I get this weird zigzag pattern on and off. (Where the lines seem to zig up and down on one line while going down and up on the line below.) But the biggest trouble is just straining to interpret the meaning of the text and not just the sounds.

Some of these things work better when I wear tinted lenses, and some don't. But it's hard to separate them from autism, migraine, exotropia, etc. It's also hard for me to articulate how many things are unusual about my vision because most of these things have always been there. I mostly only learn about them when they either go away for some reason, or someone else articulates something similar to my experiences. I do know that (without my knowledge) doctors have marked me down as "low vision" on forms in the past because of the degree of difficulty I have with utilizing my vision, even though I am corrected to near 20/20 vision (garden-variety myopia and astigmatism). It's not that I have blurred or absent vision, but that my visual processing is wonky enough that it's not a reliable way of getting good information about the world without a great deal of effort.

My daughter is having trouble reading and I am wondering if this is the problem. She can read when there is only a few large words on a page but if there is a paragraph she becomes overwhelmed and looks away (won't attempt to read it). I have tried many things as this has ben going on for over a year now. She is in second grade. How do I go about finding out if my daughter has this disorder? Is there some easy way to find out?

Thanks!

Not sure which part of it you want more information on. The only stuff I know to mention: I didn't even think to mention to the eye doctor that I had double vision until I got uncomfortable during an eye exam (after he uncovered both of my eyes) and he asked if I had double vision. I'd assumed that since my regular doctor never told me anything about glasses (when he asked me about double vision), then I didn't need to tell an eye doctor. (Of course some people with exotropia or other similar conditions don't have double vision at all because their brain compensates by ignoring information from one eye.) So I was lucky he asked, because otherwise I wouldn't have said anything. Prism lenses cause light to be diverted in some way so that even when your eyes are pointed two different directions, somehow it acts as if they're pointed in the same direction. They're not the kind of prism that makes things look different colors, they look no different than regular glasses.

I have one eye that likes to point off in the entirely wrong direction (hey, my foveas can be focused on two totally different things at the same time; isn't that neat?), and I notice that although I would definitely say I have depth perception, well... it's about equally good with one eye shut. It doesn't bother me (whereas the brief taste I had of prisms-- at an eye appointment-- hurt), and I can usually make them both look forward when I care (is it normal for anything at a distance you're not focusing at to be double?), but I've been thinking about it lately, especially because whenever I hear anyone talking about depth perception, it doesn't make sense with my experience, like the idea that you wouldn't have any with one eye, or looking at a picture (from the right angle, anyway). I was wondering if you had any advice. I'm really sorry to bother you.