Sep 20, 2013 09:47 AM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

Researchers at the Smithsonian believe e-readers like Kindles, iPads and Nooks are the antidote for people who have trouble reading because of dyslexia, according to a press release.

E-readers counteract some key elements of dyslexia. Visual attention deficit is an element that makes it hard for a person to concentrate on words within a line and lines within a page and so on. Visual crowding is when letters pressed close together in a word appear jumbled and incoherent.

With an electronic reader, e-reader, a user can customize the size of the text and space the lines on the page more generously, alleviating visual crowding and attention deficit.

"At least a third of those with dyslexia we tested have these issues with visual attention and are helped by reading on the e-reader," said lead author Matthew H. Schneps, director of the Laboratory for Visual Learning at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. "For those who don't have these issues, the study showed that the traditional ways of displaying text are better."

This is the second study on improving reading among dyslexics conducted by Schneps. In his first, he recorded eye movements of dyslexic students while they read. The results to that study foreshadowed this one, as the participants were better able to read when the lines on the page were shorter.

This study, published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE, measured for comprehension while reading e-books. The participants not only showed improvements in efficiency, but also were better able to understand the meaning within text.

Schneps and his team analyzed 103 students with dyslexia from Boston's Landmark High School who read from a traditional book and then from an e-reader with lines no more than three words long. Also contributing was the small screen of the e-reader, which the team believe further cut down on any visual distraction.

As tablets and e-readers continue to make their way into the classroom, studies like this will certainly help that cause.

"The high school students we tested at Landmark had the benefit of many years of exceptional remediation, but even so, if they have visual attention deficits they will eventually hit a plateau, and traditional approaches can no longer help," said Schneps. "Our research showed that the e-readers help these students reach beyond those limits."

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