Irlen Syndrome often affects depth of field perception. One outcome of this presents itself with difficulties driving. For me, it made it difficult to tell when I had enough time to pass a vehicle on a 2 lane road when another vehicle was coming at me. I also tended to come up behind a vehicle too suddenly. In addition, I had trouble with parallel parking. And then aside from this there is the trouble with glare. This happened with cars coming at me on a 2 lane road or coming up behind me on any road. It always seemed that the vehicle had its bright beams on, but when I flicked on my bright beams I always found out that I was wrong. This mystified me. When I received my tinted Irlen filter lenses this all ended.

If you have a strong attraction for writing or printing on a certain color of paper it is most likely a clue that you have Irlen Syndrome. I always preferred yellow legal pads or sometimes pink (but I was hesitant to use pink because I thought that might seem odd for a guy to use). When I used these colors the color of the page no longer tried to wrap around what I was trying to read.

Irlen Syndrome

In 1960, in my senior year of high school at Dundee, Michigan, I decided to be a pharmacist. I was told that I would learn mostly from lectures rather than books. Secondly, as a pharmacist, I would be reading short written orders. All my life I watched for any possible way to read and remember faster and better. At age 56 I attended a talk about adult ADD at the Ann Arbor ADD Center given by Pam Stevens (now Pam Letterman). I wondered why she was sporting purple-tinted eyeglass lenses. When she explained why I was floored. She explained that she had Irlen Syndrome and that the lenses made reading much easier. I told her what reading was like for me, and she referred me to Ann Bonvallet, an Irlen Diagnostician, here in Ann Arbor. I had 2 appointments with Ann and found by trial and error that rose-colored lenses were the solution to my quest.

I learned, for the first time, that people normally read in phrases rather than reading one word or part of a word at a time. I was enabled to read 4 to 5 words at a glance and, in fact, found that I saw my whole world with a new perspective. I would say that I suddenly saw 3-dimensionally. This meant that objects in my foreground were in focus as well as objects in the background. I had only experienced this before when I took 35mm photos tweaked to give depth of field, and I thought I was distorting the way the picture appeared. I saw the picture as one image.

I almost drove off US-23 when I glanced at a wooded area and realized I could see clearly into the woods. Had there been a deer I would have seen it. Before this I had to choose where I was focusing. Normally my image was that of the foreground, like the edge of the woods.

In addition, I was no longer plagued by bright headlights at night, especially from cars coming up behind me or at me on a 2-lane road. In the past I thought most cars were rudely using their bright beams and I would see big glows coming from oncoming cars. After receiving the tint I saw just the headlights, and in town I could even see the pattern of the glass.

The lenses were a light filter. They filtered out the portion of the light spectrum that was interfering with images reaching my brain as intended. Irlen Syndrome is a visual perception problem. This is explained in 2 different books. One is Reading by the Colors by Helen Irlen. Get the revised edition. The second is The Light Barrier by Rhonda Stone. You can find lots of helpful information at my website which is www.rogerwheaton.com. On it you will find symptoms of Irlen Syndrome and links for those interested in autism. You will find a link to many other sites including www.irlen.com, the official site of The Irlen Institute in Long Beach, California.