A reading path is a term used by Gunther Kress in Literacy in the New Media Age (2003).
Kress suggests that reading paths that contain visual images are more open to interpretation and the reader's construction of meaning.
[1] An example of a linear reading path might be a textbook, with pictures, or paragraphs where the reader is led to assume cause-and-effect sequences, for example.
In such multi-modal texts, the reading path is much less linear and more open to the reader's interpretation.
The idea that reading paths differ according to evolving, emerging, multi-modal texts, are part of the New literacy studies, visual rhetoric, and the concept of multiliteracies.