We're a speech therapy software company making evidence-based treatment for adults with stroke, brain injury, and other conditions more accessible.
📖 Reading after a stroke: what's going on (and what can help)
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Reading a text message. Skimming a menu. Catching up on the news. Most of us don't think twice about these things... until we can't do them the way we used to. After a stroke or brain injury, reading often gets harder, slower, and more exhausting. If you've noticed this, you're not alone. 🧠 What's going on in the brainReading isn't a single skill. It's a complex chain of steps your brain performs in a fraction of a second: recognizing letters, combining them into words, pulling meaning from memory, retrieving the sounds, and making sense of it all. All before you realize you're doing it. When a stroke or brain injury disrupts that process, it's called alexia, an acquired reading difficulty. Sometimes a letter seems to move to another part of the word. Sometimes only half of the word is visible. Or a familiar word just won't click. Sometimes reading just feels really exhausting in a way that's hard to explain. 💡 Strategies that can helpThere's no single fix, but here are some strategies that can help reading feel more manageable: 👆 Use your finger (or a card): Sliding your finger under each word, or using a card to block the lines below, can help you stay on track 🗣️ Read aloud: Sometimes reading the words out loud can help improve understanding 📏 Start small: Words → phrases → sentences → paragraphs → full articles 🔁 Read, then read again: Each pass can strengthen the reading pathways in your brain and help the content click ⏱️ Practice a little every day: Short, consistent sessions do more than occasional long ones – even 5 minutes counts! 🛋️ Read when you're most alert: Save reading for the time of day when you have the most energy 📱 Apps to practice readingProgress is still possible, even years after a stroke! Tactus has a range of reading apps, from single words to full paragraphs. Find your level, and build from there.
If reading used to be automatic and is now difficult, be patient with yourself. Regaining your reading skills takes a lot of hard work. But every time you sit down to practice, your brain is building stronger pathways. Keep going! You've got this. All the best, P.S. Want to understand more about reading after a stroke? Check out this deep dive on alexia. It's a bit more in-depth, but if you're someone who likes to know the details, you can read it here → |
Tactus Therapy
We're a speech therapy software company making evidence-based treatment for adults with stroke, brain injury, and other conditions more accessible.
Your brain keeps two records of everything you read. One stores the gist. This is the meaning, the shape of it, what it was roughly about. The other stores the verbatim trace: the actual words, the specific details, the data point in the third paragraph. The gist is durable. It sticks around, gets consolidated into long-term memory, and becomes part of what you "know." The verbatim trace is fragile. It starts degrading almost immediately. To be fair, it's supposed to. Retaining every word of...
A patient reads “dog” easily. And the non-word “slib” without hesitation. But show them “plaid" and they said "played." The word "island" becomes "iz-land." What's going on here? 🤔 Answer: surface alexia (the phonological route is intact; irregularly spelled words are a struggle) If you got that – kudos! 🤗If you didn’t… don’t beat yourself up. 🥴 Even if you nailed the diagnosis, the treatment details for surface alexia might be rusty. As SLPs, we're expected to hold a lot of information in...
Hey Reader – Quick question: when you get a new aphasia referral, how much of your evaluation is focused on reading? Alexia tends to be a small part of the assessment, and while functional reading always gets a goal in the treatment plan, the depth of evaluation and treatment it actually warrants often gets squeezed out by everything else on the caseload, right? 🙈 Given that over 80% of people with aphasia present with alexia… that’s a gap worth noting. The thing is, “acquired alexia” isn’t a...