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Dyslexia-friendly news sites - how to make any site readable
News sites are some of the most hostile real estate on the web for a dyslexic reader. Narrow columns, busy navigation rails, low-contrast captions, autoplay video that steals your eye every fifteen seconds, paragraphs broken up by inline subscription prompts. None of it is designed to be read - it is designed to be scrolled. The good part is that almost every problem on a modern news site is fixable in the browser, in under a minute, and the same recipe works on the BBC, the New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, and your local paper.
The short version
Layered recipe, in order of impact: swap the font (OpenDyslexic, Lexend, or Atkinson Hyperlegible), bump the size, open reader mode, then tweak background colour and line spacing if needed. Most readers feel a difference after the first two steps; the rest is fine-tuning.
You do not need a new device, a paid subscription, or a special browser. Everything below works in plain Chrome on a laptop you already own.
Why news sites are particularly hard
A news article looks simple - a headline, a few paragraphs, maybe a photo. The page it lives on is almost never simple. A typical front-page article on a major outlet renders forty to sixty separate visual elements: ticker headlines, recommended-reads rails, embedded video, social-share buttons, a sticky header that follows you down the page, a sticky newsletter prompt that follows it up. For a reader who tracks text by holding the line with peripheral vision, that surrounding motion is a constant pull on the eye. Every shimmer is a regression waiting to happen.
Then there is the typography. News brands lean heavily on serif body fonts (Georgia, Lyon, Imperial, Cheltenham) because serifs read as authoritative and historical. Serifs are not inherently bad for dyslexic readers - the picture is more nuanced than the internet's blanket "sans-serif is better" rule of thumb, and we wrote about that in detail in our serif vs sans-serif piece. But news serifs in particular tend to be set tight, small, and in low contrast against off-white backgrounds, which is roughly the worst combination of variables you can pick.
Here is what a typical news layout looks like on the eye, and what the same words look like after a few tweaks:
Same text. The second version has a dyslexia-friendly font (Atkinson Hyperlegible), a warm cream background, a single column, slightly looser line height, and no surrounding chrome. Almost every step in this article is moving toward that second block.
Step 1 - Change the font
This is the single highest-leverage change you can make. The body font of a news site is usually decided by a brand committee and locked into the stylesheet; you cannot change it from inside the article. You have to override it at the browser level.
There are three fonts worth trying first, in roughly this order:
OpenDyslexic if you experience letter rotation (b/d, p/q, m/w "swapping" or appearing to flip). The weighted bottoms anchor each letter so it cannot rotate visually. It looks busy at first - many people bounce off the aesthetic - but the letter-confusion benefit is the most-replicated result in the dyslexia-font literature. Our deep dive on OpenDyslexic in Chrome covers when it is and is not the right answer.
Lexend if your main complaint is reading fatigue rather than letter confusion. Lexend was designed around tracking and word-shape clarity, and the largest published study on it (Microsoft Research, 2021) found measurable reading-fluency gains in the upper deciles of struggling readers. It is also far easier on the eye for long articles than OpenDyslexic. We covered the research and the trade-offs in OpenDyslexic vs Lexend.
Atkinson Hyperlegible if your reading problem overlaps with low vision, screen glare, or visual stress rather than dyslexia specifically. The Braille Institute designed it to make ambiguous letter pairs (capital I, lowercase l, the digit 1) unmistakable, and it stays legible at smaller sizes than the other two. Background on the typeface and where it shines is in our Atkinson Hyperlegible writeup.
The cheapest way to swap any of these onto every news site you read is the LexiFont Chrome extension - one click and the override applies to every page, including subsequent visits. If you do not want an extension, you can also enable the font in your operating system and force websites to use it through Chrome's built-in font settings, but the extension approach is faster, undoable, and per-site togglable.
Step 2 - Bump the size, then bump it again
News sites set body text small. The default body size on most major outlets sits between 16 and 18 pixels - fine for a designer with 20/20 vision and good lighting, often too small for anyone reading on a glossy laptop screen at the end of a working day. Dyslexic readers in particular benefit from larger type: the research consistently finds gains in reading speed and accuracy at 18-24 px for adult readers, with diminishing returns above that. Full numbers and the diminishing-returns curve are in our piece on best font size for dyslexic adults.
You have two levers in Chrome. The first is Cmd-plus (Mac) or Ctrl-plus (Windows) to zoom the whole page - quick, works on every site, persists per-domain. The second is Chrome's font-size setting (Settings > Appearance > Font size), which scales only the text and is gentler on layouts. Try zoom first; if the layout breaks, switch to font-size.
A practical target: take a paragraph on the article and stand back about an arm's length from the screen. If you can comfortably read it without leaning forward, the size is fine. If you find yourself leaning, you need more.
Step 3 - Reader mode is your friend
Chrome has a built-in reader mode (called Reading Mode in recent versions; enable it via chrome://flags if you do not see it yet) that strips the entire visual chrome of the article - sidebars, banners, ads, recommended-reads - and reflows the text into a single column with adjustable font, size, spacing, and background. On news sites specifically, reader mode is often the single best intervention because the surrounding clutter is doing most of the eye-pulling.
Reader mode and a font override are not in competition - they work together. Reader mode handles the layout; the font override handles the typeface. The combination is most of the recipe by itself.
Reader mode does have limits. It struggles with multi-part articles, articles that lean heavily on inline images or charts, and a handful of paywalled outlets that block it. For those, dropping out of reader mode and using a font-override extension on the original layout usually works fine. We compared the two approaches head-to-head in reader mode vs reading extensions for dyslexia.
Step 4 - Soften the background
Pure white on pure black, or pure black on pure white, is harder on dyslexic eyes than most people realise. The contrast is real but the glare is brutal, and for readers with visual stress or Irlen syndrome it can actively trigger letter movement on the page. The standard recommendation in the dyslexia-research literature is a warm off-white background - cream, ivory, or pale yellow - paired with dark grey rather than full black text. We laid out the colour combinations that perform best, with examples, in background colours for dyslexia.
Reader mode lets you change the background directly. If you are reading the original layout, a browser extension that injects a custom stylesheet will do it for you, or you can use Chrome's High Contrast or Color enhancements (Settings > Accessibility) for a coarser version of the same idea.
If you have already tried tinted overlays for reading on paper, the screen equivalent is to pick a background tint that matches what worked on paper. Our Irlen and tinted overlays piece walks through that translation.
Step 5 - Loosen the spacing
News articles default to tight line spacing (1.3-1.4) to fit more text in the viewport. Dyslexic readers consistently do better with more breathing room, usually 1.6-1.8. The same goes for letter spacing - a touch of extra tracking (0.02-0.04 em) reduces letter crowding without making the text feel airy. Reader mode exposes both as sliders; font-override extensions usually have them in the settings panel. The mechanism is covered in line spacing and letter spacing for dyslexia.
The reason this helps is mechanical. Dyslexic readers regress (flick the eye back to re-parse a word) more often than non-dyslexic readers, and tight spacing makes regressions harder - the eye has to thread back through a denser thicket of letters. Looser spacing turns each regression into a cheaper operation. There is more on the eye-movement side of this in dyslexia and eye tracking.
Step 6 - Kill the autoplay, blur the surrounding motion
Even if you have all the typography right, a video autoplaying in the corner will keep pulling your eye every few seconds. The easiest fix is to disable autoplay at the browser level - Chrome supports this via chrome://settings/content/sound for audio, and via extensions for video. For sites that insist on autoplaying anyway, a content-blocker or a reader-mode session is usually enough.
Some readers also benefit from blurring the periphery - using a window-darkening extension or simply tiling the browser window narrower so the peripheral chrome is off-screen. It feels silly until you try it; many dyslexic readers report dramatic comfort gains from simply not seeing the sidebar.
The complete recipe, on a checklist
- Install a font-override tool (LexiFont, or any equivalent). Pick OpenDyslexic, Lexend, or Atkinson Hyperlegible based on the symptoms above.
- Zoom the page to where a paragraph reads comfortably at arm's length.
- Open Chrome reader mode (or stay on the article if reader mode fails).
- Switch to a cream or pale background, dark grey text. Reader mode has this built in.
- Loosen line spacing to 1.6-1.8, letter spacing to 0.02-0.04 em.
- Disable autoplay video. Narrow the window if peripheral motion still distracts.
- Read for ten minutes. If something still feels off, isolate one variable at a time.
The first three steps are doing most of the work. The rest is fine-tuning for individual sensitivity.
Site-specific notes
BBC News. Defaults to a serif body font at 18 px. Reader mode works cleanly on article pages but not on the homepage. Overriding the font is the highest-impact change here; the layout is already reasonably calm.
New York Times. Uses Imperial as a body font, set at 17 px. Reader mode works but loses some of the inline graphics. If you read NYT for the data journalism, override the font on the original layout rather than switching to reader mode.
The Guardian. Guardian Egyptian is a custom slab serif - readable, but small and tightly set. Reader mode is excellent on Guardian articles and recovers most of the inline formatting.
Le Monde, El Pais, FAZ. Continental papers tend to use even smaller body sizes than English-language outlets. Bump zoom higher than you would for an English site and the rest of the recipe is the same.
Local papers and aggregators. Variable quality - some are catastrophic, some are clean. Reader mode usually wins on these because their layouts are the worst offenders.
A note on paywalls and ethics
None of the advice above is about getting around paywalls - it is about reading what you have legitimately accessed in a way your eyes can handle. Most newspapers actively support accessibility tools; the BBC and Guardian, for example, explicitly recommend reader mode in their accessibility documentation. If you are a subscriber and your typography preferences mean you read the long-form pieces you are paying for instead of bouncing off them in the first paragraph, the paper benefits too.
Where LexiFont fits in
The font-override step in this recipe is what we built LexiFont for. The free tier gives you OpenDyslexic on every site you visit, with one click. LexiFont Pro ($14.99, one-time) adds Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, and Comic Neue, plus per-site memory so news sites stay in your preferred font without you toggling it on every visit. It is not the only tool that does this; what it is, is the fastest path from "this article is unreadable" to "I am reading this article" without leaving the page.
If you have not tried a font override on a news site before, the surprise factor on the first try is usually larger than people expect. Pick the longest news feature you have been meaning to read, apply the recipe, and see whether you finish it.
Get LexiFont Pro - OpenDyslexic, Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible and Comic Neue for $14.99 one-time