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Thanks for the link; I'll have to study it a little. Glancing at chapter 4 it seems they emphasize keyboard topography. I believe that is my weakest area ... I have very little spacial acuity - at least down the accuracy of a single key.

@Maechre: I like the idea of sight reading videos. Come on you excellent sight readers, take out your cameras and motivate us!

the best method for sight reading I have ever done was to take a Bach invention and sight read measure by measure or half bar by half bar (looped) ie you just keep playing measure one over and over. then do measures one and two until up to tempo
then measures one two and three etc

while singing and saying the letter names of first right hand then left hand then both.
all while playing hands together. you may spend a half hour saying just left hand while playing both hands then you will sing and say letter names of right hand while playing both

it is incredibly difficult and grueling but after a few months you will literally hear the music in your head when you see the notes.

truly amazing and your ability to sight read even complex material will improve dramatically

you should do this in conjunction with playing simpler pieces at sight.

look at this exercise like doing stretches or push ups before doing a sport
the pushups are not the sport they make you better at doing the sport

Andy, that is indeed an interesting topic. I would like to discuss this below:

Tip #4a: Keyboard topography (for beginners)
As a beginner try this: Close your eyes and create a mental image of the keyboard. Now, in your imagination hit the keys C,B,A,G,F,E,D,C and name them. Do you see the geometry of the black and white keys? In the beginning I couldn't do it.

I learned it the hard way: I tried to sight read without(!) looking down the keyboard. The only way I could do this was to use my tactile sense, e.g. when I had to play a G, I would try to feel the group of 3 black keys and I knew that G is next to F#. As you can imagine I was very frustrated at the beginning since what I played did not resemble music at all but rather stuttering. I already wanted to give up but I am glad that I didn't.

I think this helps me with relative position. Consider this example with the left hand: if I had to play a C with my thumb and F# (to the left of C) with my pinky, I know immediately where F# is.

Someone has compared this with the Braille method for blind people.
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Tip #4b: Keyboard topography (advanced)
Advanced means you have an absolute sense of position. If I told you a note, for example G, you could hit the right key with your eyes closed.

Examples:
Have a look at Tom Brier's left hand. It's godlike! Look at those jumps.

Tips on how to acquire this advanced skill? Unfortunately, I don't have this absolute sense of position. My guess is that ragtime or stride piano is a good way to achieve it since it involves large jumps.

Here is another video of Tom Brier where a woman covers his sight to the left to check whether he peeks down (@4:25). Tom also explains "how" he does it (@3:25)

Another example is the amazing blind pianist Derek Paravicini. In this video he plays the Maple Leaf Rag also involving large jumps.
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Now here is a question for you:
a) Has anyone taken the same (frustrating) route as me with respect to the "Braille" method
b) Does anyone here have this absolute sense of position? If yes, how did you practice it?

I can't get anything from the LDS music site to print. I get a header and footer only.

I guess they know what a heathen I am.

wget -U "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:15.0) Gecko/20120427 Firefox/15.0a1" -r -l1 -A.pdf http://www.lds.org/cm/display/0,17631,7329-1,00.html

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=children_book.pdf *.pdf

Tip #5: Be patient and have fun
I think this is the most important tip. How many times have we gotten frustrated because we expect our sight reading skills to suddenly make a leap. Nope, it's not going to happen. I compare sight reading to actual reading. Think back and remember how many years it took you to become fluent in reading a book. You were first learning about letters, then words and then sentences. With sight reading it's the same.

I consider myself to be in "elementary school" level with my sight reading and I am willing to work on it. Also, I just enjoy it. I love playing a new piece of music and suddenly recognizing the melody. My sister has this thick book with folk songs with the melody line and the chord symbols above it. I could play the chords on the guitar but I didn't know the melody which bugged me for years. Guess what, now I play them on the piano, and it's super fun!

Tip #6: Read at the right level
We should read pieces that are not too hard and which we can read with comfort. Don't be too proud to take easy pieces. Just to give you an idea, I started by grabbing a children song book and playing only the melody line.

Here is a nice video where Valery Lloyd-Watts talks about a woman who is an excellent sight reader. And the woman became so good because as a child she played 50 books of level 1 and 50 books of level 2.

Tip #7: Sight read on a daily basis
Do it regularly. I try to sight read at least for 15 minutes a day.