Search for reading apps and ADHD and you get children’s products. That is a real market, but it is not this one. This page is about adults who can read perfectly well and still lose the paragraph three times.

First, the necessary sentence: a reading app is a tool, not a treatment. Nothing here diagnoses or treats anything. If reading difficulty is new or getting worse, that is a conversation for a clinician, not an app store.

The specific thing single-word reading changes

Ordinary reading gives your attention somewhere to go. The eye can drift to the next paragraph, back to a word you half-read, or off the page entirely — and by the time you notice, you have to find your place again. That re-finding is where a lot of reading time actually goes.

RSVP removes the option. There is one word, in one place. You cannot drift to the next line because there is no next line on screen. For people whose problem is losing the place rather than parsing the sentence, that is a direct fix.

What it does not do

  • It is not a proven comprehension treatment. RSVP hides surrounding text and makes looking back less immediate.
  • It does not guarantee understanding at a set speed. Higher settings can lower scores, but there is no universal WPM ceiling or fixed order in which kinds of comprehension decline.
  • It does not remove fatigue. At least one study found visual fatigue increased with one Spritz presentation. Blink rate fell too, but that alone does not establish the cause.

Settings that matter more than speed

  • Start slow. 300 words per minute, not 600. The benefit here is attention, and attention does not improve with speed.
  • Pause at sentence ends. Without it, sentences run together and you lose the boundary that makes a paragraph parseable.
  • Take the break prompt seriously. The fatigue signal is unreliable in this format.
  • Use a warm-up. Starting at full speed from the first word is how a session ends after two minutes.

An honest limit

If you finish a session and cannot say what the chapter argued, the format is not working for that material — and going faster will not fix it. Dense material that needs reasoning is better read normally. Use this for the reading you keep not starting.

Punctum applies these defaults out of the box and keeps everything on the device. See also reading apps for dyslexia — for adults.

References