Does he have good posture when he reads, or does he bend his head around, look at the book from an angle, hold his head close to the book etc? If he doesn't do any of those, I'd most likely guess vision isn't the issue.
A really good point, but just a warning though - our ornery DD didn't do a single one of the usual signs (which is why I took so long to check out visual processing). But wave a pencil around in front of her eyes, and you can easily see the chaos.
Good point
FWIW, the "waving a pencil" test is something you can do at home easily. It is only one clue and if it's ok that doesn't mean there *isn't* an issue - but otoh, if we'd ever known to do this we would have right away known that something was up with our dd's vision. There are different things you can do with focusing on a pencil, but one that was really obvious for our dd re tracking (or lack thereof lol) was to hold a pencil up about 3 feet in front of her, slowly trace a circle in the air (parallel to her standing body, not parallel to the floor, diameter approximately 1 yard). Have your child follow the tip of the pencil as you trace the circle and watch his/her eyes. Do they track together or do they diverge? I honestly just about freaked the first time I saw what my dd's eyes did with this - they followed for about 1/4 cycle and then looked off in two completely different directions.
polarbear
ps - another clue re reading and vision - our dd hated reading and wasn't progressing *but* she could read and had been tested so we knew there weren't any reading-related challenges. What we noticed was that when she read aloud to us, she would read a-ok for a bit then stumble across a really easy word that we knew she should know (something like "new" yet she could read longer more complicated words). I think that visually it was easier to put together a longer word than a short one when she was having difficulty focusing her eyes together. She also skipped lines and got lost on the page occasionally. I suspect that for a child who's verbally advanced and motivated to read, the ability to synthesize meaning from context could make up a lot for small details they were missing visually while reading.
