Blog · Practical setups
Dyslexia-friendly Google Docs setup
Google Docs is, by default, a fairly hostile reading surface for a dyslexic user. The default font is Arial 11, the line spacing is single, the page is bright white, the margins are narrow, and your eye has to track sentences that run nearly the full width of a 21 cm page. Almost every one of those defaults is adjustable — and a handful of well-chosen tweaks turn Docs into a calm, readable workspace. Here's the setup.
The short version. Switch to Lexend or Atkinson Hyperlegible at 13–14 pt, set line spacing to 1.5, indent the margins so a line is roughly 60–70 characters wide, change the page colour to a warm cream (#F7EFE1), and use a browser-level font override for the editor chrome and other Google apps that ignore your in-doc choices.
Why the defaults work against you
Look at the same paragraph in a default Google Doc and in a dyslexia-friendly setup:
The change is mostly about taking pressure off of three places where dyslexic readers consistently struggle: letter shape, line tracking (finding the start of the next line), and visual stress from high-contrast white. None of these tweaks require Pro features — they're all in the free version of Google Docs.
1. Choose a dyslexia-friendly font
Google Docs ships with a long font list, but only a few of the fonts in it are good choices for dyslexic readers. From best-fit to least-fit:
- Lexend — built specifically around reading-speed research; available natively in Docs (Font menu → "More fonts" → search "Lexend"). Comes in five widths; the regular weight is the right starting point.
- Atkinson Hyperlegible — designed by the Braille Institute to disambiguate confusable letter pairs. Also available via "More fonts."
- Comic Neue — the grown-up version of Comic Sans, with the irregular, hand-drawn letter shapes many dyslexic readers prefer, minus the awkward mid-2000s aesthetic. Available via "More fonts."
- OpenDyslexic — the gold-standard dyslexia font, with weighted-bottom letter shapes designed to prevent b/d/p/q rotation. Not available in Google Fonts, which means it does not appear in Docs's font picker. To use it, you need a browser-level font override (see step 5).
To add a font: Font menu (the dropdown showing "Arial") → More fonts… → type the name in the search box → click it to add it to your list → OK. The new font appears at the top of your font list and persists across documents.
If you don't know which to start with, Lexend vs Atkinson Hyperlegible covers the trade-offs. The fast heuristic: if your reading struggle is "I lose speed and get tired," start with Lexend; if it's "I confuse specific letter pairs," start with Atkinson Hyperlegible.
2. Set the size, weight, and spacing
The settings that make the biggest difference, in order of impact:
Font size: 13 or 14 pt
Docs defaults to 11 pt. For sustained reading, 13–14 pt is far easier on most dyslexic readers and barely changes how much text fits on a page. Set it once, then save it as your default: Format → Paragraph styles → Normal text → Update 'Normal text' to match. Then Format → Paragraph styles → Options → Save as my default styles. Every new document will open in your preferred size.
Line spacing: 1.5
Format → Line & paragraph spacing → 1.5. Single spacing crowds the lines together and makes "line skipping" — your eye landing on the wrong line when it returns from the right margin — much more likely. The independent research on line spacing in dyslexic populations consistently lands on a sweet spot between 1.4 and 1.6; 1.5 is the safe middle. We cover the why in line spacing and letter spacing for dyslexia.
Paragraph spacing: a small gap
Same menu, "Add space before paragraph: 6 pt." A bit of breathing room between paragraphs gives the eye a clear "this is a new thought" cue and reduces the wall-of-text feel.
Letter and word spacing
Google Docs doesn't expose these directly in its menu, but if you select text and use the menu Format → Text → Character spacing (in some accounts under "More," in others as a Docs add-on), you can nudge tracking to about +0.5 pt. The effect is subtle but real for dyslexic readers — a touch of extra space prevents adjacent letters from visually merging.
3. Make the line shorter
A standard A4 or US Letter page in Docs gives you a line about 90–100 characters wide at 11 pt. That's much wider than the 50–75-character range typography research recommends for comfortable reading, and the wider the line, the harder it is to find the start of the next one when your eye returns to the left margin.
Two ways to fix this:
- Widen the margins. File → Page setup → Margins. Set left and right to 4 cm (≈1.6 in) instead of the default 2.54 cm (1 in). Lines drop to roughly 65–75 characters at 13 pt.
- Switch to Pageless mode. File → Page setup → Pageless. The text now reflows to the width of your window, and you can actually narrow your browser window to set the line length to whatever feels right. This is the more flexible option but it also strips out page breaks, headers and footers.
4. Change the page colour
White (#FFFFFF) is the highest-contrast background a screen can produce, and high contrast is one of the documented contributors to visual stress in dyslexic and Irlen-prone readers. Cream backgrounds — historically used in printed books precisely because pure white was harder to read on — are the easy fix.
File → Page setup → Page color → Custom → enter #F7EFE1 (a warm cream) or #FAF3E0 (a paler cream). Other useful values:
#FBF2D8— buttercream, slightly more yellow.#EAF2E8— pale mint, useful for some Irlen-pattern readers.#E8E8E8— neutral light grey, lower contrast without colour cast.
Try cream first; it's the closest analogue to a printed-book page and the most universally tolerable. Save it as default the same way as the font: Format → Paragraph styles → Options → Save as my default styles. Then File → Page setup → Set as default. New documents will open in cream.
If you write in dark mode generally, note that Docs's own dark mode (the one in the gear icon) only inverts the editor chrome, not the page colour you set. We've written separately about dyslexia-friendly dark mode — short version, the warm-cream-on-dark-grey "soft dark" combination tends to outperform pure inverse for most dyslexic readers.
5. The Chrome tweak that ties it all together
Here's the catch with all of step 1 through 4: they only apply inside the body of your document. Google Docs's own UI — the toolbar, menus, comment threads, the share dialog, the file picker, the sidebar — still uses Google's default UI font (Roboto / Google Sans). The same is true if you bounce out to Gmail to check a message, or open a Google Sheet, or read a comment in Drive. None of that responds to your in-doc font choice.
This is where a browser-level font override comes in. LexiFont applies your chosen dyslexia-friendly font to the entire page — toolbar, sidebar, comments, dropdown menus — not just the document body. It's also the only practical way to use OpenDyslexic in Docs, since Google Fonts doesn't host OpenDyslexic and Docs's font picker can't reach it.
The setup once LexiFont is installed:
- Click the LexiFont icon in your Chrome toolbar.
- Pick a font (OpenDyslexic, Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, or Comic Neue with Pro).
- Toggle "Apply on docs.google.com" on. The Docs editor and all its UI immediately switch to your chosen font.
- If you also want it active in Gmail, Sheets and Drive, toggle each domain on. Settings persist across browser restarts.
The free tier of LexiFont includes OpenDyslexic. LexiFont Pro ($14.99 one-time) adds Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, and Comic Neue, plus per-site letter-spacing and line-height controls — useful if you want different spacing in Docs than on, say, news sites.
6. The voice tools that come with Docs (and why to use them)
While you're in the settings, two built-in tools are easy to miss and disproportionately useful for dyslexic users:
- Voice typing (Tools → Voice typing, or Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + S). Lets you dictate instead of type. Many dyslexic writers find composition far easier when they don't also have to manage spelling in real time.
- Screen-reader support (Tools → Accessibility → Turn on screen reader support). Even if you don't use a full screen reader, switching this on enables better keyboard navigation, an audible "selected" cue, and improved compatibility with browser read-aloud extensions.
Pair voice typing with a read-back tool (the macOS system-wide "Speak" service, or a Chrome read-aloud extension) and you can write a paragraph by speaking, hear it back, and edit by ear — a workflow many dyslexic professionals find dramatically less effortful than typing-and-rereading.
7. A "save as default" checklist
Once you've found a setup you like, lock it in so you don't have to redo it for every new document:
- Open a fresh document.
- Set font, size, line spacing, paragraph spacing, page colour and margins to your preferred values.
- Format → Paragraph styles → Update 'Normal text' to match.
- Format → Paragraph styles → Options → Save as my default styles.
- File → Page setup → Set as default.
Every new document you create — and every blank doc someone shares with you that you copy as a starting point — will open in your preferred setup. The defaults only apply to new documents; existing ones keep their own formatting unless you re-apply Normal text.
What this won't fix
Two limits worth being honest about. First, Google Docs's default styles are global, but documents shared with you carry their author's styles, not yours. If a colleague sends you a document in Calibri 10, your defaults don't override it — you have to select-all and apply Normal text manually. Second, comments and suggestions in Docs use a separate UI font and a slightly smaller size, and there's no in-Docs way to change them. The browser-level override in step 5 is the only fix.
If most of your dyslexia-friendly reading happens outside Docs — long articles, news, documentation — the browser override is doing the heavier lift anyway. The in-Docs settings cover writing; the browser extension covers everything else.