Visual stress? Those words meant nothing to me until Christmas 2024, when I was at a work event and met Kimberley Harrison, the CEO of Cerium Visual Technologies (CVT), a UK company helping a subset of children and adults who struggle to read due to visual stress.
I discovered that visual stress means difficulties an individual experiences when reading text, particularly when it is set against a white background. Additionally, smaller text can make reading harder, as words and letters seem to move. While I was chatting to Harrison and finding out more about this and her company, I suddenly realised what she was saying about visual stress described my 10-year-old daughter!
Ever since my daughter started school at the age of four, my husband felt her reading was unusual: she would mispronounce words because she sounded them out differently from others. As time went on, my husband suspected she may be dyslexic, but I wasn’t completely convinced because she did not struggle with some of the typical dyslexia symptoms. She could follow steps; her reading comprehension was great and she always passed her school’s fluency tests – not with flying colours but, nevertheless, with a pass.














