Blog
Notes on dyslexia-friendly typography, reading research, and making the web easier to read.
Automatic hyphenation splits words across line ends and forces you to reassemble them mid-read. Why that taxes dyslexic readers, when it bites hardest, and how to switch it off in Chrome, Word and Google Docs.
Facebook's feed is dense, grey and locked to one font. The dark-mode and zoom settings that help, the font swap only the desktop site allows, and habits for getting through a noisy feed without re-reading.
WhatsApp locks you into a small system font on a busy chat layout. The text-size and theme settings that help, and the font swap that only WhatsApp Web allows - plus habits for keeping up with busy group chats.
Teams crams real-time chat, channels and threads into a tight, fixed font you cannot change. The theme, the comfy density setting, and the font swap that make Microsoft Teams readable with dyslexia - plus why the web app beats the desktop app.
Slanted type tilts the letters, thins the strokes and tightens the spacing - undoing several of the things dyslexic readers rely on. When italics still earn their place, and how to flatten an italic-heavy page back to upright text in Chrome.
Uppercase strips out the ascenders and descenders that give each word its recognisable shape, so dyslexic readers fall back on slower letter-by-letter decoding. Where caps still earn their place, and how to turn shouty pages back into readable text in the browser.
Stack Overflow stacks dense prose and code blocks on every answer, usually read in a hurry while something is broken. The dark mode, page zoom and reading habits that help - plus the font swap on the prose that the site will not do for you, with code left in monospace.
Outlook's tight defaults, stretched reading pane and mixed font stack are hard on dyslexic eyes. The built-in settings that help - spacing, reading pane width, Immersive Reader - plus the Chrome font override that makes every received message readable in one go.
The width of a text column is one of the cheapest reading fixes and one of the least discussed. Long lines force a long return jump to the next row, where dyslexic readers most often lose their place. The research points to 60-70 characters per line, and here is how to get there on any site.
A grid of dense numbers is close to a worst case for a dyslexic reader - context-free digits, two-axis tracking and cramped defaults. A practical setup for Sheets and Excel: the font that keeps digits distinct, room for the rows to breathe, banding to carry your eye, and reading critical numbers back to catch silent errors.
Digits are where a misread does the most damage - a wrong code, a wrong total, a wrong phone number. Why numbers get confused and transposed, the homoglyphs that cause it (0 vs O, 1 vs l), and the fonts and figure styles that make them clearer.
GitHub stacks three kinds of text on one page - prose, code and diffs - and each taxes a dyslexic reader differently. The appearance and accessibility settings that help, plus the fix GitHub hides: a font swap for the prose, with code left in the monospace it needs.
Discord is dark, dense and fast - the three things dyslexia makes expensive. A practical setup - the appearance settings most people never open, a font swap the app will not do for you, and a quieter feed - that turns a wall of grey messages into something you can sit with.
X-height is the height of the lowercase letters, and it quietly decides whether a font feels readable or exhausting. A generous one makes text look bigger without changing the size - but push it too far and the ascenders and descenders shrink, flattening the word shapes dyslexic readers lean on. Where the sweet spot sits, and how to land on it.
A Chromebook is a browser with a lid, which makes it the easiest computer to bend toward a dyslexic reader - and the one most likely to be handed to a student who needs it. The ChromeOS display settings, Chrome's Reading Mode, Select-to-speak, and the font swap that does the most work, in the order that buys the biggest comfort gain for the least fiddling.
X, still Twitter to most of the people who read it, is built for the kind of reading dyslexia makes expensive - hundreds of short, unconnected bursts of text at speed. A practical recipe - a font swap the app will not do for you, bigger type, the Following tab, Lists and dark mode - that turns the firehose into something you can sit with.
Mixing up b and d is not "seeing letters backwards" - it is a quirk of how the brain recognises shapes regardless of orientation. Why b, d, p and q are the four troublemakers, what a disambiguating font can and cannot fix, and the spacing and size tweaks that matter as much as the typeface.
Substack quietly became one of the longest-form reading surfaces on the web - a typical essay runs three to six thousand words. The defaults are above average, but not actively helping a dyslexic reader. A practical recipe - font swap, column width, dark mode, the Inbox view instead of email, footnote habits and a mobile fallback - that turns long essays into something you can sit with.
Reddit is one of the longest-read sites on the web - and one of the harder ones for a dyslexic adult. A practical recipe - opt out of the redesign, an old.reddit habit, a font swap the site will not do for you, Night Mode, collapsed comment chains, Multireddits and a separate mobile workflow - that turns the firehose into something you can sit with.
Notion is a docs tool, a wiki and a database all at once - and the defaults punish dyslexic eyes. A practical recipe - font swap, page width, dark mode, a calmer sidebar and a workspace shape that does not fight you - that turns Notion into a tool you can sit with for hours instead of minutes.
AI chatbots are quietly the longest single body of reading most adults now do on the web, and the chat frame works against the long-form content the model produces. A practical recipe - the settings most people skip, a font swap for the web app, a one-line custom instruction that reshapes every reply, and a TTS pairing - that makes ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini comfortably readable.
Slack's typography is competent; the cadence around it is brutal. A practical recipe - the accessibility settings most people skip, a low-noise sidebar, a browser-tab font swap that the desktop app cannot do, a threads-first reading order, and a pull-don't-push notification schedule - that turns Slack from a firehose into a workplace tool you can sit with.
Two weighted-bottom typefaces designed for dyslexic readers. One charges seventy euros a year, the other is free under an open licence. They share a design philosophy, share roughly the same research profile - mostly skeptical - and the honest verdict is shorter than the marketing would like. Where the paid one is genuinely worth it, where it is not, and the spacing tweak that matters more than either font.
Modern variable fonts ship a continuous range of weights, widths and optical sizes inside a single file. For dyslexic readers, that small technical change matters more than it sounds - the right comfort weight is rarely 400 or 700, and the slider lets you land on whatever actually works. A practical guide to the axes that matter, the fonts worth knowing, and how to find your personal setting.
LinkedIn is one of the harder reading surfaces on the web - not because of its typography but because of how its writers behave on top of it. A practical recipe - dark mode, the Recent feed sort, aggressive unfollowing, a font-override extension, Reader Mode for long posts, and a bullets-first job-search workflow - that turns LinkedIn from a broetry headache into something you can sit with.
Most dyslexic adults gave up on TTS years ago because the voices were robotic and the controls clunky. Neither is true any more. A practical Chrome setup - the built-in Read aloud most people miss, the three commercial extensions worth installing, and the listen-while-you-read combo that pairs TTS with a dyslexia font.
Two-column PDFs in 10pt Times New Roman, justified to ragged rivers, broken up with superscript citations and unfamiliar terminology. A six-step workflow - reflow, font swap, single-column it, anchor on structure, skip citations on the first pass, recover - that turns "I bounced off" into "I got through it."
Wikipedia is the longest single body of reading most people do on the web, and its defaults are not built for dyslexic eyes. A five-minute recipe - the Vector 2022 Appearance menu, the right account preferences, a font-override extension on top, and a separate mobile setup - turns any article into something you can sit with.
A working checklist for designers and developers - typography, layout, colour, motion, forms - that focuses on the smallest set of choices that actually helps dyslexic readers. Print the two-minute version, ship the rest in an afternoon, and stop fighting the user's own font extension.
Times New Roman is the default for academic papers, legal contracts and most Word documents - and it is one of the harder faces for dyslexic adults to read. Here is exactly which design decisions get in the way, and the per-surface swaps that fix it in Word, Google Docs, PDFs and the browser.
Subtitles flicker on a moving background in a thin sans-serif you cannot meaningfully change. Here is the service-by-service recipe - Netflix, YouTube, Disney+, Prime Video, Apple TV+, Max, VLC - that actually helps dyslexic viewers, with the one setting that beats every font tweak.
There is no single best font for a child with dyslexia, because reading itself is not a single skill. An age-staged guide - emerging readers, decoders, reading-to-learn, independent teens - with the fonts, sizes, and spacings that fit each stage, and an honest take on when OpenDyslexic helps and when it gets in the way.
Most dyslexia-reading advice assumes a desktop browser. The phone is where most reading actually happens, and the operating system - not the browser - controls most of the levers. Here are the iOS and Android settings that genuinely help, in order, plus the ones that sound useful but mostly are not.
Most dyslexia-font advice is written for screens. Paper is a different reading environment: different resolution, different ink behaviour, no glare, no adjustability. Here is which typefaces actually work in print, why OpenDyslexic can be harder on paper than on screen, and how to set up a printed page that reads kindly.
If reading drains you faster than it drains other people, working memory is usually the reason - not focus or willpower. Here is how dyslexia loads the cognitive system page by page, why fatigue compounds, and the practical typographic fixes that buy back capacity.
Justified text creates rivers of white space and uneven word spacing that drag a dyslexic reader's eye off the line. Left-aligned keeps a steady rhythm. Here is the research, the trade-offs, and how to flip any site - browser, Kindle, Word, Google Docs - to left-aligned in one click.
A 5000-word piece in The Atlantic, a long-form profile, a 40-page work PDF - they all turn into a project past about 1500 words. Here is the six-step workflow that gets you through long-form reading without bouncing off it: strip the page, set typography, set surface, anchor structure, pace, recover.
Most dyslexia-font advice quietly assumes one language, and that language is English. Here is what changes when you read in two languages every day - Latin plus Cyrillic, Italian plus English, Arabic plus anything - and the practical font picks that hold up across scripts.
News sites are some of the most hostile pages on the web for dyslexic readers. Here is the layered, six-step recipe - font, size, reader mode, background, spacing, motion - that turns BBC, NYT, Guardian and the rest into a comfortable read in under a minute.
Skipped lines, re-reading the same sentence, finger on the page. Eye-tracking research explains why dyslexic readers lose their place - and the column width, line height and tracking aids that quietly fix most of it.
Sassoon Primary was designed by watching children read. Here is what makes it work for young dyslexic readers, where it falls short, and how to pair it with the spacing, size, and background that actually do the heavy lifting.
Which Kindle font is best for dyslexia, and which settings actually matter more than the font? A practical, research-first walk through Bookerly, OpenDyslexic, Amazon Ember and the rest - plus the size, spacing and boldness recipe to try tonight.
BeeLine Reader colours each line with a smooth gradient that pulls your eye to the next line. Bionic Reading bolds the start of every word. Two very different fixes for two very different problems - here is how to pick.
Chrome's PDF viewer cannot reflow or restyle, which is why most font-override tools do nothing on PDFs. Here is the practical workflow - tweak, extract, reflow - that turns most PDFs into comfortable, dyslexia-friendly reads.
Google Docs is the longest text most adults read each week, on a surface tuned for the average reader. Here's the practical, dyslexia-friendly setup - fonts, spacing, page colour, defaults - in the order to apply it.
Monospace fonts make code line up - but they also make 0/O, 1/l/I, and ;/: blur together. A practical guide to coding fonts and IDE settings for dyslexic developers.
Gmail's defaults are hard work for dyslexic eyes - dense, narrow, low contrast. Here is the exact set of built-in settings and Chrome tweaks that fix it, in the order to apply them.
Chrome's reader mode strips a page to plain text. Reading extensions like LexiFont change the font, spacing and colours instead. For dyslexic readers, the right choice depends on what is actually slowing you down.
Off-white, pale blue, soft grey, mint - which background colour actually helps dyslexic readers? A research-first guide with the exact hex values to try in Chrome.
Bold often feels easier to read at first glance. For dyslexic readers, the picture is more complex - here's what font weight actually does for legibility, and the settings worth trying.
The right font size for dyslexic adults isn't simply "bigger." Here's what the research recommends, why over-sizing backfires, and the exact settings to try in your browser.
The standard advice is "use sans-serif." The evidence is more nuanced - the variables that actually drive readability sit one layer deeper than the serif/sans distinction. A research-first answer.
Dark mode is often pitched as kinder for dyslexic eyes. The research is more nuanced - here's what inverted contrast actually does for reading, and how to set it up well in Chrome.
Letter spacing has a peer-reviewed reading-speed benefit for dyslexic readers - in some studies, larger than the benefit from changing fonts at all. The numbers that work, and how to apply them to any site.
Bionic Reading bolds the first syllables of every word. OpenDyslexic redraws the letters themselves. They target different problems, and the evidence behind each is very different. A head-to-head, research-first comparison.
A ranked, evidence-led review of the five fonts most often recommended for dyslexic readers — OpenDyslexic, Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, Comic Neue, and Sassoon Primary.
Five ways to override website fonts in Chrome — built-in settings, zoom, DevTools, Stylus user stylesheets, and dedicated accessibility extensions — compared.
Typography tweaks, reading rulers, tinted overlays, bionic reading, reader mode — an honest verdict on each, based on what the research and readers report.
What Irlen syndrome (visual stress) is, why paper overlays don't translate to monitors, and how to test screen tints in a browser.
Google's Lexend targets reading speed. The Braille Institute's Atkinson Hyperlegible targets character disambiguation. Here's how to choose — or use both.
Two opposite approaches to dyslexia-friendly reading. Here's how they compare, what the research says, and which one to try first.
How weighted letter bottoms help some dyslexic readers, and the right way to enable OpenDyslexic on every website.
Google's Lexend is built around reading-speed research. Here's what that research actually found — and how to try Lexend on every site.
The Braille Institute designed Atkinson Hyperlegible to disambiguate characters like 0 vs O, a vs o, I vs l. Here's how to use it as your default reading font.
The anecdotal love for Comic Sans among dyslexic readers has some basis. Here's what the research says — and why Comic Neue is probably a better choice.
