In a word yes.

To understand peripheral vision the following analogy might help.

Imagine a camera. Most cameras these days have 'autofocus'. They automatically make the central image sharp and allow the background to be in softer focus. An interesting thing about these cameras is that they can 'zoom' in to fill the picture with a central image or 'zoom' out to take in more of the landscape. Just by pushing a button.

Your eyes focus in much the same way. When you look at something close to you it is in clear sharp focus while the background is in a softer more blurred focus (what is left to notice that is), since, like the camera we zoom in and a lot of the background gets cut out of the picture. We use this type of focus for regular reading. We learnt at a very early age to 'zoom' in on the letters/word groups, keeping the range narrow and sharp.

Peripheral vision on the other hand is zooming out and allowing more of the landscape onto the print. This opening of vision is one we are accustomed to doing, just not accustomed to using for 'reading'.

Our eyes behave like two cameras (it is afterall where they got the idea when they designed the camera. They wanted the camera to behave more like our eyes when recording pictures). So even if you only have vision in one eye... you have the camera to take a photoreading snapshot of the page.

These days with autofocus cameras, the central image was always sharp and the background is usually pretty sharp too. However in the past the cameras were manually operated and this resulted in a lot of backgrounds being in focus yet the central image was somewhat blurred. It usually didn't matter we still kept the pictures because we recognised what they were off(and aunt Hattie does look better in soft focus afterall ). This is the same as photofocus in photoreading. While you are learning and becoming familar with photoreading you are 'manually focusing the camera' and the background is sharper than the central image.

After a time you can find yourself graduating to an autofocus camera, where the main image develops a sharpness. The more you photoread the more the likely that you gain the 'auto focus' skill. There may be some vision defects where this is impossible, that's still okay because some of the best most valuable photos (Photoreading) will still have the main image in soft focus. The mind appreciates that.

For the record the eye 'is' like a camera... It doesn't make sense of what it sees it just takes the picture and lets the brain develop it. All that you 'see', photoreading, reading, just looking or noticing are snapshots recorded by the your eyes. The inner mind 'sees' and determines what it means and it will even fill in the blanks (you know about the 'blind spot', right?). All 'seeing' is really done preconsciously.

So if you can see and read this, then yes, you can also photoread.

Alex