If you have ADHD, "just focus harder" has never once worked as reading advice. The problem usually isn't motivation, it's that standard reading (scanning a page, letting your eyes wander line to line) puts a lot of the attention-management work on you, at exactly the point where that's hardest. A few concrete changes to how you read can take a lot of that burden off.
1. Remove the eye-movement decision entirely
Every line of normal reading asks your brain to decide where to look next; when to jump to the next line, whether to re-read a phrase, when to skip ahead. For ADHD readers, that stream of small decisions is often where focus actually breaks down, not the content itself.
RSVP (Rapid Serial Visual Presentation), showing one word at a time in a fixed spot; removes that decision completely. A 2025 study in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society found ADHD participants comprehended better with RSVP than with normal paced reading, while neurotypical readers' comprehension didn't show the same benefit, suggesting the eye-movement demands of standard reading are specifically what interferes with reading in ADHD, not reading comprehension in general.
2. Read in short, bounded sections — not "as long as you can"
Open-ended reading ("get through this chapter") gives your attention nothing to aim at. A fixed section with a visible end point; three pages, one subsection, ten minutes; gives you a concrete finish line, which makes it much easier to actually start.
3. Use structured breaks, not breaks-when-you-crash
There's a real difference between a planned break and stopping because you've already lost focus. Biwer et al. (2023) compared structured versus self-regulated study breaks and found the structured version supported better sustained engagement, deciding in advance when you'll pause, rather than waiting until concentration is already gone.
4. Pair text with audio when the material allows it
Listening while reading gives you two channels processing the same information instead of one. It won't fix comprehension on its own, but for material where losing your place is the main problem, an audio track can act as a pacer that keeps pulling your attention back to where you are on the page.
5. Reduce what's visually on the page
Dense academic PDFs are full of things competing for attention that have nothing to do with the argument — running headers, footnotes, two-column layouts, citations mid-sentence. Stripping a page down to just the body text, one paragraph or word at a time, removes a lot of that competition before you've even started reading.
None of these are about trying harder. They're about changing the format of the task so it asks less of the part of attention that's hardest to control. That's the whole idea behind SwiftsReader - RSVP reading, audio pairing, and structured breaks built in by default, not something you have to engineer yourself every time you sit down to read.