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 does not improve comprehension. When presentation formats are compared, showing more context at once scores better for understanding. RSVP trades context for focus.
  • It does not remove the speed ceiling. Past roughly 350 words per minute comprehension drops, and inference goes before facts. Reading faster is not the same as reading more.
  • It does not remove fatigue. At least one study found visual fatigue increased with single-word presentation, likely because blink rate falls when the eyes stop moving.

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

  • Lancashire, JSLTR — RSVP comprehension at 250/300/350 wpm versus 400/450.
  • “Degradation of inferential reading comprehension at speed” (ResearchGate).
  • ScienceDirect — text presentation format and comprehension (karaoke > multi-line > single line > RSVP).
  • ScienceDirect — “RSVP in reading: the case of Spritz” (comprehension and visual fatigue).