My DS was in an accident sledding when he was 5 and fractured his skull and had a severe concussion. His eyes were quite obviously pointing in two different directions and one was stuck and wouldn't move at all for months. I remember when he was in the PICU the ped. opthamologist came in and held up 2 fingers and asked DS how many fingers were up and DS said 4. I asked him to read a sign on the wall across the room (a whiteboard where nurses write things like their name and the patient's name) and he read that just fine. The vision issues went on for months. Usually he went to school with an eye patch on his good eye (the one that actually tracked), but he generally had it off at home. He was able to read fluently. He may at times have been shutting one eye to read, but I think most of the time he just looked at one of the images and ignored the other one.
The OT gave him a Test of Visual Perceptual Skills expecting him to do really, really bad and was shocked when he scored 3 or 4 years ahead of his age. We aren't sure how much he had recovered by the time he took that test.
One test to get done is depth perception. If the eyes aren't aligned, there would be no depth perception. DS did really bad on depth perception tests for about 6-8 months and then he got his depth perception back.
If you are worried about patterns, the TVPS would pick that up. DS scored very high on the WISC perceptual reasonaing section and I was worred his IQ would artificially inflate the TVPS score (so even if he DID have vision issues, the high IQ would mask the problem), but the neuropsych said that wouldn't happen.
Also one thing to keep in mind is that kids with vision problems sometimes have troubles tracking when they are reading, and lose their place. This didn't seem to be a big issue with my DS though.
