The app is the instrument. This is the practice. Fourteen units in two tracks — one that starts by making the page stop fighting you, one that takes an ordinary reader past 700 wpm with the comprehension check still passing. Every unit has exact settings, a duration, and a pass mark you can fail.
These aren't beginner and advanced. They're two different problems. Foundations removes the obstacles between you and the page. Velocity assumes reading already works and pushes the ceiling. Plenty of people do Foundations first and Velocity after — that's the intended path, not a consolation prize.
Ten minutes in the Gym before a unit. The Academy programmes your reading on real documents; the Gym drills the machinery underneath it — peripheral span, chunking, a regression lock and a ceiling test that has to survive a comprehension check. Unit V1 goes faster if you already know your verified ceiling.
Open the GymOpen a unit, read why it exists, then press the button. It opens the app with the exact settings already applied — pace, pairing mode, words per frame, voice, comprehension check. You read, the app scores you, you come back and mark it done. Nothing here is gated: skip ahead whenever you like, but the pass marks are where the honesty lives.
Reading rate is not a slider you drag. Each step below is a different thing your brain has to stop doing — and one of them is a wall almost everybody hits at around 400. The Velocity track is built around getting through that wall without paying for it in comprehension.
Silently pronouncing words chains your rate to your speaking rate — roughly 150–250 wpm for most people, and no amount of effort raises it. Above about 400 the inner voice simply cannot keep up, and most readers panic and slow down. The trick is not to fight the voice. It's to give meaning another way in, so the voice becomes optional rather than load-bearing.
A large share of ordinary reading time goes to regressions — the eye jumping back to a word already passed. A single fixed point removes the possibility. This is free speed, available on day one, and it costs nothing in comprehension. It's also why Foundations Unit 1 works for readers who have no interest in speed at all.
Past roughly 550 wpm, one word per frame means the display is changing faster than the eye can usefully resample. Two and three-word frames give the same word count in fewer changes. This is where most of the last 150 wpm comes from — not from reading each word faster, but from reading fewer, larger frames.
Any speed is achievable if you stop caring what you understood. That's why every unit past the first has a recall floor. If the score drops below it, the unit is failed and the correct response is to drop 50 wpm and repeat — not to move on and hope. A speed you can't pass a check at isn't a reading speed.
Fifteen minutes on five days moves you further than ninety minutes on one. The adaptation you're after is perceptual, and perceptual learning consolidates between sessions rather than during them. Sleep does a real part of this work.
Drill at a pace that feels slightly out of control, then do your actual reading 50–100 wpm below it. The uncomfortable pace is the training stimulus; the comfortable one is where the work gets done. Never do real work at your drill speed.
Comprehension feels fine at speeds where it isn't. That feeling is the single reason speed-reading has the reputation it has. The check takes forty seconds and is the only thing standing between training and self-deception.
There is no single correct reading speed. Triage an abstract pile at 700. Read a contract clause at 200. A trained reader isn't someone who reads fast — it's someone who can choose, and who knows which one this document deserves.
A failed unit is information, not a setback. Fall back 50 wpm, repeat until the check passes twice, then step up again. Progress in this is a staircase with landings — people who refuse the landings plateau and quit.
Reading speed decays like any trained skill, but slowly, and it comes back fast. A short weekly protocol holds a hard-won 700 indefinitely. Everything below is ordinary reading you were going to do anyway — just with the settings chosen on purpose.
Four minutes at 100 wpm above your working pace, mode icon behind word, no voice. Then two minutes back at your working pace, which will feel absurdly slow. That contrast is the whole point of the exercise.
Run any passage of 400+ words at your working pace with the comprehension check on. If recall sits under 70% two weeks running, your working pace has drifted above your real one. Drop it 50 and rebuild.
The maintenance that actually works is using the app for work you had to do anyway. Import the paper, the filing, the chapter. A trained skill you never use in anger is one you will lose.
The baseline unit, at your natural pace, on unfamiliar text. It takes fifteen minutes and tells you whether the last month was progress or a story you were telling yourself. Compare it against the history on your account page.
Reader Academy is not a therapy, an intervention or a diagnostic instrument, and nothing here should be read as clinical advice. Dyslexia is a difficulty with decoding that has real neurological substance; a presentation format can make reading more comfortable for some people, and that is genuinely worth having, but it does not remediate the underlying difficulty and we will never say otherwise. If reading difficulty is affecting education or work, a qualified specialist assessment is the thing that helps, and this is not a substitute for one.
On speed: the research is clear that comprehension falls as rate rises, and that the fall accelerates once the material stops being easy or familiar. We think pairing meaning to a second channel changes the shape of that curve. We don't think it repeals it. Anyone promising 2,000 wpm with full comprehension is selling something — at those rates you are skimming, which is a legitimate and useful thing to do, but it is not reading and should not be scored as if it were.
Which is why the pass marks in this course are recall scores rather than speeds, and why the app shows you both numbers side by side and lets you export them. If the Academy doesn't work for you, the evidence for that will be sitting in your own session history. We'd rather you find that out in a week than in a year.
No account required, nothing to pay, nothing uploaded. Pick a track, open the first unit, and let the comprehension check settle the argument.