Blog
Notes on dyslexia-friendly typography, reading research, and making the web easier to read.
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.
