Blog · Reading research

Dyslexia and eye tracking - why some readers lose their place

10 min read · May 14, 2026

You finish a paragraph and realise you have no idea what it said. You drop down a line and somehow end up two lines lower. You re-read the same sentence three times before it lands. If any of that sounds familiar, the problem is rarely "I'm not concentrating." It's that your eyes are doing something different from a typical reader's eyes - and most websites are laid out as if everyone reads the same way.

The short answer

Losing your place isn't a focus problem - it's a tracking problem. Eye-tracking studies consistently show that dyslexic readers make more backwards jumps (regressions), land less accurately when starting a new line, and have more variable fixation durations than non-dyslexic readers of the same age.

The fixes are mostly about geometry: narrower columns (around 45-75 characters), more line height (1.5 to 1.7), a font that anchors letter shapes clearly, and - for some readers - an explicit tracking aid like a ruler, a finger, or a colour gradient. None of these are cures. All of them are cheap to try.

What eye tracking actually shows in dyslexic reading

When researchers point an infrared camera at someone reading, they don't see a smooth left-to-right sweep. They see fixations (brief pauses, usually 200-300 ms) connected by saccades (fast jumps of 7-9 characters on average). Comprehension happens almost entirely during the fixations; the saccades are too fast to see anything.

Across decades of studies, three patterns show up more often in dyslexic readers than in matched controls:

1. More and longer fixations per line. Where a typical adult might fixate 5-7 times on a 12-word line, a dyslexic adult often fixates 9-12 times, and each fixation may last longer. The line takes more total time not because the reader is slow on each word, but because they're fixating more often - including on small words a typical reader would skip.

2. More regressions. A regression is a saccade that goes backwards - the eye jumps left to re-read a word or phrase. Non-dyslexic adults regress around 10-15% of the time. Dyslexic adults often regress 25-40% of the time, sometimes more on unfamiliar vocabulary. This is the felt experience of "wait, what did that just say?"

3. Less accurate line returns. The hardest moment in reading is the line return - the long sweep from the end of one line back to the start of the next. Eye-tracking shows dyslexic readers land at the wrong line more often, especially when lines are long, line-height is tight, or the column has no consistent visual rhythm. This is the felt experience of "I just skipped a line and didn't notice."

Importantly, the cause-and-effect arrow runs both ways. Decoding difficulty produces extra fixations and regressions. But the layout of the text also makes line-return errors more likely - and those errors compound the decoding problem because you now have to retrieve where you actually were. Layout is the lever you can pull. Decoding is mostly already there.

Why screens often make it worse

Print is forgiving in ways the web isn't. A paperback runs at roughly 55-65 characters per line with generous leading. A typical news website runs at 90-110 characters at default desktop zoom, with line-height around 1.3-1.4. That's exactly the geometry eye-tracking studies flag as hardest to track.

Three specific screen problems:

Long lines. Every extra character on a line makes the line-return saccade longer, less accurate, and more likely to drop you on the wrong line. The widely cited "45-75 characters" guideline isn't an aesthetic preference - it's the range where the eye can reliably find the next line without help.

Tight leading. Default browser line-height is around 1.2. At that density, adjacent lines visually blur into each other in the periphery. Eye-tracking studies on web reading consistently find lower line-return accuracy below 1.4, and most accessibility guidance (including our own breakdown of line and letter spacing) lands on 1.5-1.7 as the sweet spot for dyslexic readers.

Inconsistent rhythm. News sites and blogs interrupt the column with images, pull-quotes, ads, and embedded videos. Every interruption forces a fresh line-return calibration. Reader mode and reading extensions strip those out, which is one of the most underrated reasons they help (more on this in our reader-mode vs reading-extensions comparison).

The geometry fixes (do these first)

Before reaching for any specialised tool, fix the layout. These four changes will quietly absorb a large fraction of "losing my place" episodes:

Cap your column width. Aim for roughly 60-70 characters per line on desktop. On a typical 1440-wide screen at 18-19px body text, that's a column around 600-700 pixels wide. Reader mode does this automatically. If you prefer to read articles in their original layout, a browser extension that injects a max-width on the main column does the same job.

Push line-height to 1.5 or 1.6. This is the single biggest line-return improvement for most dyslexic readers. The text takes more vertical space, which feels wasteful at first - until you notice you're no longer re-reading lines.

Use a slightly larger font size. Larger characters mean fewer characters per line at the same column width, which mean shorter saccades and easier line returns. There's a whole calibration question here, covered in best font size for dyslexic adults - the short version is to err toward 18-20px for body text rather than the 14-16px most sites default to.

Here is the same paragraph at default web density and at dyslexia-friendlier density, so the difference is visible rather than abstract:

Default web density · line-height 1.2, ~95ch wide The eye returns from the end of one line to the start of the next using a long, low-precision saccade. The longer the line and the tighter the leading, the more likely that saccade lands on the wrong line - which is the moment most dyslexic readers describe as "losing my place."

Dyslexia-friendlier · line-height 1.9, ~32ch wide The eye returns from the end of one line to the start of the next using a long, low-precision saccade. The longer the line and the tighter the leading, the more likely that saccade lands on the wrong line - which is the moment most dyslexic readers describe as "losing my place."

The font fixes (do these second)

A well-chosen font won't change saccade behaviour much, but it does two useful things: it reduces fixation duration on individual words (because letter shapes are unambiguous), and it gives the eye a clearer "anchor" when it lands on a new line.

Three families to try, each with a different rationale:

Atkinson Hyperlegible was designed for low vision but works well for dyslexic readers too. Its design exaggerates the differences between similar letters (the lowercase a, e, c and o are unmistakable), which reduces the kind of mid-word regressions where a reader briefly misidentifies a letter.

OpenDyslexic weights the bottom of each letter, which some readers describe as making letters "stay still." The independent research on it is mixed, but for the subset of dyslexic readers whose problem is letter rotation (b/d/p/q), the subjective benefit is real.

Lexend is specifically tuned to widen letter spacing, which can directly reduce crowding effects - the way adjacent letters interfere with each other in the periphery. For readers whose issue is more "the line blurs together" than "the letters flip," Lexend is often a better first try than OpenDyslexic. The full comparison lives in OpenDyslexic vs Lexend.

Don't guess. Test all three for a few minutes each on the same long article and notice which one lets you read longer before fatigue sets in.

Tracking aids (do these third)

If geometry and font choice haven't solved it, the next layer is an explicit tracking aid - something the eye can follow.

A finger or a card. The oldest tracking aid in the world, and still one of the most effective. Place a card under the line you're reading, slide it down line by line. It eliminates the line-return problem entirely because the next line is always the one just above the card edge. Many adult readers stopped using a finger because they were told it was childish; eye-tracking research suggests it's actually a sensible compensatory strategy.

A reading ruler extension. Several Chrome extensions overlay a translucent horizontal band on the page that follows your mouse cursor. It does in software exactly what a card does in print. Worth trying if you're reading long articles and find yourself trailing off.

BeeLine Reader-style colour gradients. BeeLine tints each line with a smooth colour gradient (e.g. red at the start, fading to blue at the end), so the line you've just finished and the line you need to jump to are visually distinct colours. It works for some readers and feels overwhelming to others. The full story (and how it compares to Bionic Reading) is in BeeLine Reader vs Bionic Reading.

Background tint. A cream or pale-blue background can reduce visual stress for readers with overlapping Irlen-type sensitivity, which often co-occurs with line-tracking difficulties. Our notes on which tints help (and which make it worse) are in background colours for dyslexia.

A practical checklist for losing-your-place problems

Column width capped at about 60-70 characters - if the site is wider, switch to reader mode
Line-height at 1.5 or higher - 1.6-1.7 if you regularly skip lines
Body text at 18-20px, not 14-16px
A font that anchors letter shapes - Atkinson Hyperlegible, Lexend, or OpenDyslexic, picked by which feels right after a five-minute trial
A tracking aid for long-form: finger, card, ruler extension, or colour gradient - whichever stays out of your way
Cream or pale-blue background if pure white feels glaring
Reader mode by default for any article longer than a few paragraphs

Where LexiFont fits

LexiFont is a Chrome extension that applies a dyslexia-friendly font to every website with one click. The free tier ships with OpenDyslexic. LexiFont Pro ($14.99 one-time) adds Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible and Comic Neue, plus a font-size override and a line-height slider - which is the geometry side of the fix you've just read about.

It doesn't replace reader mode (it sits on top of any layout, including reader mode) and it doesn't replace a tracking aid. What it does is make the font and spacing changes one-click instead of fighting with every site's CSS. If "the column is fine but the type is wrong" is your daily frustration, it's the cheapest thing you can try.

Get LexiFont Pro - OpenDyslexic, Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible and Comic Neue for $14.99 one-time

The honest caveat

None of this fixes dyslexia. Eye-tracking patterns associated with dyslexia don't disappear when you change a font - they get easier to live with. What layout, font and tracking aids do is shift the difficulty curve so you can read for 40 minutes before fatigue instead of 8. That compounds. A reader who can sustain attention long enough to finish an article is a reader who reads more articles, which is a reader who keeps getting better at reading. The geometry isn't the cure; it's the difference between giving up and finishing the page.

If you're working with a clinician on visual processing, eye-tracking exercises or vision therapy may be part of your plan. Nothing in this article replaces that. It's the read-the-web-on-Tuesday-afternoon layer, not the clinical layer.