Development and validation of the Turkish version of the MNREAD visual acuity charts

Aim: To design and validate a Turkish version of the MNREAD acuity charts.Materials and methods: A vocabulary was created using high-frequency words that appear in Turkish schoolbooks used by 8-year-old children in the third grade. In total, 125 sentences were generated. The sentences were read by 2 groups (20 adults and 20 primary school students), and reading time and verbal mistakes were recorded. Thereafter, persistent verbal mistakes and sentences with extreme high and low mean reading speeds were excluded. Finally, the validity of the participants’ reading speed as measured with the MNREAD Turkish version was determined by comparing it to their reading speed for daily reading tasks.Results: Reading speed for text of 1.6 M print size (logMAR 0.6) was 185.10 ± 20.46 words/min, reading speed for text of 1 M print size (logMAR 0.4) was 185.45 ± 27.27 words/min, and the maximum reading speeds calculated using the MNREAD Turkish version were 191.50 ± 32.19 words/min for chart 1 and 190.55 ± 27.35 words/min for chart 2. As expected, correlations were observed between chart 1 and chart 2 (r = 0.88, P 0.01), between chart 1 and logMAR 0.6 text (r = 0.74, P 0.01), between chart 1 and logMAR 0.4 text (r = 0.67, P 0.01), between chart 2 and logMAR 0.6 text (r = 0.63, P 0.01), and between chart 2 and logMAR 0.4 text (r = 0.59, P 0.01).Conclusion: The MNREAD Turkish version was tested using persons with normal vision and results were obtained from similar groups using daily reading material. The MNREAD acuity charts are logarithmic and continuous-text reading acuity charts for people in Turkey with normal and low vision.