Purpose:

To design and to validate a Turkish version of the MNREAD (Minnesota Low Vision Reading Test) acuity charts.

Methods:

The vocabulary was built up with using the high-frequency words from Turkish books. They are mostly used 8 year old children (3rd grade students in Turkey). Totally, 125 sentences were generated. While the sentences were read by two separate groups (20 adults and 20 primary school students) the reading time and verbal mistakes were marked. Thereafter, both the persistent verbal mistakes and the sentences with extreme high and low mean reading speed (±1 standard deviation) were excluded. Finally the validity of the MNREAD measure of reading speed demonstrated by comparing reading speed with MNREAD sentences to everyday reading task.

Results:

Reading speed for the text with 1.6 M print size (log MAR 0.6) were 185.10±20.46 words/minute, for the another text with 1 M print size (log MAR 0.4) were 185.45±27.27 words/minute and the maximum reading speeds calculated by MNREAD Turkish Version were 191.50±32.19 words/minute for chart 1, 190.55±27.35 words/minute for chart 2. As expected the correlations were found between chart 1 and chart 2 (r=0.88, p<0.01), chart 1 and log MAR 0.6 text (r=0.74, p<0.01), chart 1 and log MAR 0.4 text(r=0.67, p<0.01), chart 2 and log MAR 0.6 text (r=0.63, p<0.01), chart 2 and log MAR 0.4 text(r=0.59, p<0.01).

Conclusion:

The MNREAD Turkish version was tested with normal vision persons and the results were obtained from groups similar with everyday reading material. The reading speed measured on MNREAD-Turkish was statistically equivalent to reading speed of the text. The MNREAD Acuity Charts are the logaritmic and continuous text reading acuity charts for normal and low vision in Turkey.

Keywords: MNREAD acuity chart, Validation, Vision test, Visual acuity, Low vision