Speble

Eye training exercises

Train your eye mechanics. Earn XP, level up and keep your streak.

How eye training helps you read faster

Your eyes do not glide across text, they jump: they stop at fixations and see nothing in between. Reading speed depends on how much text you take in per fixation, how quickly you move to the next one and how often you jump back to words you have already read. We cover fixations in detail on the blog.

Each of the six exercises trains one of those elements: visual span, scanning speed, resistance to distractors or attention. It is mechanics training, not magic. The effect shows only when you combine it with guided-pace reading in the reader.

Six exercises and what each one trains

Schulte Tables

A classic attention test from psychology. You keep your eyes on the centre of a 5 by 5 table and click the numbers in order, and every hit refills the cell with the next number from the pool. Higher levels reshuffle the table, make numbers blink and add misleading colours. Trains visual span and search speed.

Play · Norms and training protocol

Word Pairs

A grid of tiles with word pairs. In exactly one tile the pair differs by a single letter, an accent or the order of letters. You look for it while keeping your eyes on the centre. Trains peripheral word recognition and resistance to look-alike shapes, the thing that makes you reread a sentence.

Play

Find the Word

A pattern word sits in the centre of the grid, surrounded by near-twins that differ in a small detail. You click the tile with the identical word. The target is always on the edge, so you practise peripheral vision instead of reading tile by tile.

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Find the Target

A dense grid of letters and digits with a target you must click in every place it appears before time runs out. Distractors are confusable glyphs: 0 and O, 1 and l, 5 and S. Trains fast scanning of a whole page, useful when you look for a fact in a text.

Play

Running Words

Words appear one after another in different fields, at a rhythm close to fast reading. The sequence stops at a random moment and you pick the last word among look-alikes. Trains vigilance and short-term memory at one to three words per second.

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At a Glance

Glyphs flash on a grid for one to three seconds. Then you state how many times each one appeared. You cannot count them one by one, you have to take in the whole grid at a glance. Trains iconic memory and parallel counting, the skill of grabbing a group of words at once.

Play

How to train so it actually works

  1. Short and daily. Five to ten minutes a day beats an hour once a week, and the streak on the dashboard keeps you regular.
  2. Eyes on the centre. Every exercise has a fixation point. If you start scanning the board with your eyes, the exercise loses its point; drop a level instead.
  3. Stop when you lose focus. Every mistake ends the level on purpose: precision counts, not blind clicking.
  4. Combine it with reading. After a session, open a book in the reader and raise the pace by 10 to 20 percent. Without that step, a wider visual span never reaches the text. Open the reader

Frequently asked questions

Do eye exercises really make you read faster?

The exercises alone widen your visual span and shorten reaction time, but reading speed grows only when you apply that to real text. The research review on speed reading (Rayner et al., 2016) shows that the main bottleneck is word recognition and comprehension, not eye movement itself. That is why we treat the exercises as a warm-up for guided-pace reading, not a replacement.

How long should I train each day?

Five to ten minutes. The exercises demand full concentration and after a quarter of an hour effectiveness drops. Two short sessions beat one long one.

Which exercise should I start with?

Schulte tables, because they teach you fastest to keep your eyes on the centre. Then word pairs and find the word, which carry that skill over to text. Leave running words and at a glance for when the earlier ones feel easy.

What do levels, XP and ranks mean?

Each exercise has its own levels of rising difficulty: less time, more elements, subtler differences. The first clear of a level gives XP, which adds up to a global rank. Replaying a cleared level is an endless mode that runs until the first mistake, where you chase your best streak.

Is my progress saved?

Yes. Progress is stored in your browser, and once you sign in to a Speble account it syncs across devices and with the mobile app.