Weak central coherence (WCC), i.e. a deficit in central cognitive processes, has long been a popular explanation for the tendency of autistic people to focus too much on detail, and too little on the global context. This what makes reading comprehension difficult. You have to understand how a word belongs in a sentence, how a sentence fits into a paragraph and how the paragraph is connected to the whole piece in order to understand what you are reading. A 2015 study says that WCC may not be the only explanation, people on the autism spectrum actually have a narrower functional field of vision: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0133237.
Rahul gave a startling demonstration of that the other day when we asked him to snip off dry flowers from a potted garden mum plant. Partha wanted to see if he could remove the dried blooms while leaving the closely interspersed buds intact. He did the job perfectly on the plant that was on the left side of the porch. But when I asked him to repeat the task with the other plant, it took him several minutes and multiple hints to find the plant although it was an identical one placed on the other side of the porch. You know how small our front porch is, each plant could not have been more than 2-3 feet away from Rahul.
This actually is not uncommon for Rahul at all. He finds it harder than most people to find a book on a shelf or a particular word on a page. Now that it is his job to keep track of his history work (with lots of help), I'm noticing that he does not have a sense of where he is in the chapter or unit. If he stops mid-section, it's hard for him to relocate it when he comes back. Most people simultaneously focus on a point and scan around it while searching or reading, most of us continually scan our surroundings while doing a task or simply sitting around. We do this in physical and mental spaces. Rahul tends not to do these things. He will have to be taught.
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