Blog · Typography
Line length and dyslexia: how wide should text be?
Most dyslexia advice is about fonts and spacing. Line length - how many characters sit on a single line before it wraps - gets almost no attention, and yet it is one of the cheapest things to change and one of the most common reasons a page feels exhausting to read. If you keep losing your place on wide articles, the width of the text column is the first thing to suspect.
The short answer
Aim for 60 to 70 characters per line. The British Dyslexia Association recommends 60 to 70 characters per line in its style guidance, and the WCAG accessibility guidelines suggest keeping lines at or under 80 characters to support readers with dyslexia.
Typography's classic range is 45 to 75 characters, a guideline that long predates the dyslexia research. For dyslexic readers, the sensible target sits at the lower end of that band.
Very long lines are the real problem. When a line runs much past 80 characters, the eye struggles to find the start of the next line on the return sweep, and re-reading or skipping a line becomes common.
Why line length matters for dyslexia
Reading is a series of short jumps. Your eyes do not glide smoothly along a line - they jump in small hops called saccades, pausing for fractions of a second at each fixation. At the end of a line, the eye makes a longer jump back to the left, down one row, to land on the first word of the next line. This return jump is the moment most likely to go wrong.
On a short line, that return jump is small and accurate. On a very long line, the eye has to travel a long way back, and the longer the journey the more likely it lands on the wrong line - the same one it just read, or the one below the right one. For a fluent reader this is a minor annoyance corrected in milliseconds. For a dyslexic reader, who already finds tracking effortful, every misfire costs comprehension and energy. This is the single mechanism behind most of the line-length advice you will read.
It interacts with spacing, too. A long line set with tight line spacing is the worst case, because the eye has both a long return jump and tightly-packed rows to choose between. Widening the line spacing helps, but shortening the line removes the problem at the source. We cover the spacing side of this in detail in line spacing and letter spacing for dyslexia.
See the difference
The two blocks below contain the same text. The first runs the full width of the column; the second is capped at roughly 32 characters - a touch narrow, but it makes the effect obvious. Notice how much less your eye has to travel to find each new line in the second block.
The narrow column is not automatically better - lines that are too short break sentences into awkward fragments and force the eye to jump back too often. The goal is a comfortable middle: long enough to carry a natural phrase, short enough that the return sweep stays accurate.
What the research actually says
The general typographic guideline - 45 to 75 characters per line, with 66 as a frequently cited ideal - traces back to Robert Bringhurst's work on book typography and has held up across decades of reading studies. Both extremes hurt: lines that are too long cause the tracking problem described above, while lines that are too short interrupt the rhythm of reading by forcing too many return jumps.
For struggling readers specifically, the evidence points toward the shorter end. A study published in PLOS ONE under the title "Shorter Lines Facilitate Reading in Those Who Struggle" found that readers with reading difficulty did better with narrower text, even though stronger readers showed little difference. The interpretation fits the mechanism: shorter lines reduce the demand on the eye-movement system that dyslexic readers find taxing, so the people who struggle most with tracking gain the most from a shorter line.
This is why a single number is the wrong way to think about it. Fluent readers are largely indifferent to line length across a wide band. Dyslexic readers are not - they sit at the part of the population where shortening the line produces a real, measurable benefit. If you have ever wondered why a setting feels transformative to you and pointless to a friend, this is often why.
How to count characters per line
You do not need to count letter by letter. A quick way: read across one full line and count the words, then multiply by about six (the average English word plus its trailing space runs close to six characters). Ten words to a line is roughly 60 characters; twelve to thirteen words is roughly 70 to 80. If you are routinely seeing fifteen or more words before the line wraps, the column is too wide and is a strong candidate for what is tiring you out.
In CSS terms, the cleanest way to set this is the ch unit, which is sized to the width of the "0" character in the current font. Setting a text container to max-width: 65ch caps it at roughly 65 characters regardless of font size - this is exactly what well-designed reading layouts do behind the scenes.
The numbers that work
| Setting | Value | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Characters per line | 60-70 | British Dyslexia Association recommendation; shortens the return jump |
| Hard upper limit | 80 | WCAG guidance for readers with dyslexia; past this, tracking failures climb |
| Lower limit | ~45 | Below this, too many return jumps break the rhythm of reading |
| CSS approach | max-width: 65ch | Caps line length in characters, independent of font size |
| Pair with line-height | 1.5-1.8 | Wider rows make the shortened return jump even more reliable |
How to narrow any website
The frustrating reality is that most websites ignore this. News sites and documentation in particular let body text stretch the full width of a wide monitor - often 120 characters or more per line, far past anything the research supports. A few ways to fix it, from least to most effort:
Reader mode. The reading view built into Safari, Firefox, and Edge does this automatically - it strips the page to a single narrow column with a sensible measure and comfortable spacing. It is the fastest fix and costs nothing. For when reader mode is enough and when a dedicated tool does more, see our comparison of reader mode versus reading extensions.
Narrow the window. On a wide monitor, simply making the browser window narrower (rather than full screen) shortens every line on every site at once. It is crude, but it costs nothing and works everywhere. Many dyslexic readers keep their browser window at roughly half their screen width for exactly this reason.
A reading extension. LexiFont applies a dyslexia-friendly font, spacing, and a capped reading width to every site automatically, so you do not have to fiddle with each page. The free tier covers the basics; LexiFont Pro adds the full set of dyslexia fonts - OpenDyslexic, Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, Comic Neue - so you can pair a comfortable line length with a font change in one step.
A user stylesheet. For full control, a tool like Stylus lets you force a maximum width on text containers across every site. A starter rule:
article, main, .post, .content {
max-width: 68ch !important;
margin-left: auto !important;
margin-right: auto !important;
}This is heavy-handed and will occasionally fight a fragile layout, but it works on the long tail of sites that set no sensible width of their own.
Line length is not a substitute for the rest
Narrowing the column fixes tracking - the between-line problem. It does nothing for crowding, the within-line problem where adjacent letters interfere with each other. That is what letter spacing and font choice address. The three levers are additive, not interchangeable: a comfortable line length, generous spacing, and a clear font each solve a different part of the puzzle.
If you are building a reading setup from scratch, a good order is to start with line length and line spacing (they are free and reversible), then add letter spacing, then layer a dyslexia font on top if reading still feels effortful. Our 2026 review of dyslexia fonts walks through that last step, and the dyslexia-friendly web design checklist pulls the whole set together for anyone building rather than just reading.
What to try first
The single fastest test costs nothing: take a long, wide article that you find tiring, and drag your browser window in until the text is roughly ten words to a line. Read for a few minutes. If finding the next line suddenly feels easier and you stop re-reading rows, line length was a real part of your fatigue, and it is worth making that narrower measure your default rather than an occasional fix.
Get LexiFont Pro - dyslexia fonts, spacing, and reading width in one extension, $14.99 one-time