Purpose: To develop 24 short Spanish optotype sentences for the construction of a test based on the Radner reading test to simultaneously measure near visual acuity and reading speed.
Setting: Department of Refractive Surgery, Vissum-Instituto de Oftalmológico de Alicante, Alicante, Spain.
Methods: Thirty-one sentences were constructed in Spanish following the procedure defined by Radner to obtain sentence optotypes with comparable structure and the same lexical and grammatical difficulty. Sentences were statistically selected and standardized in 60 patients divided into 2 groups by educational level. Group A (30 patients) had a university education and Group B (30 patients), a primary school education. The interval of reading time was defined as the overall mean +/-1.1 x SD. All sentences with a mean between 3.59 seconds and 4.04 seconds were selected for the reading charts.
Results: The mean age was 30.8 years +/- 6.2 (SD) in Group A and 37.3 +/- 10.7 years in Group B. The mean reading time was 3.8 +/- 0.9 seconds in all patients, 3.5 +/- 0.6 seconds in Group A, and 4.1 +/- 1.0 seconds in Group B.
Conclusion: The 24 short single Spanish sentences were highly comparable in syntactical structure; number, position, and length of words; lexical difficulty; and reading length.