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Dyslexia-friendly note-taking apps — OneNote, Notion, Obsidian, and Bear compared

12 min read · July 22, 2026

Note-taking is where dyslexia hits twice: once while you read the source material, and again while you re-read what you have just written. The app you choose determines how much friction you carry across both halves of that cycle. Font choice, line spacing, background colour, and distraction-free modes are not cosmetic features — they are the variables that decide whether you can work in a note-taking app for two hours without a headache. Here is how the four most popular options perform.

What actually matters for dyslexic note-taking

Before scoring individual apps, it helps to be specific about which features move the needle. Three categories matter most.

The first is font control. The default font in most note-taking apps is a small system sans-serif (often Inter, Helvetica, or Roboto) set around 14-15 pixels. That is workable for short notes. It becomes a problem over long review sessions, where letter-confusion errors start to stack. The apps that let you choose Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, or OpenDyslexic — and apply that choice globally, not just to a single note — give you a meaningful advantage. We have covered what makes those fonts different in our best fonts for dyslexia in 2026 guide.

The second is spacing and line height. Dense text with single line spacing is harder to track for most dyslexic readers, and longer notes compound the problem. The sweet spot identified in most legibility studies is 1.5× line height with generous paragraph spacing — the same logic we explored in line spacing and letter spacing for dyslexia. Few apps give you an explicit line-height slider; more give you a "comfortable" preset that you may or may not be able to verify is actually 1.5×.

The third is background and contrast. Pure white backgrounds increase glare on most LCD panels, and a significant subset of dyslexic readers also have visual stress that amplifies this. A cream, pale yellow, or soft grey background is often enough to take the edge off. Evidence and colour values are in our background colours for dyslexia guide.

With those three categories in mind, here is how the main options stack up.

Microsoft OneNote

OneNote sits in an interesting position. On the typography side, it is less flexible than most alternatives: you can choose any font from the standard Office library, and that includes Calibri, Arial, and Verdana — the workhorses evaluated in our Verdana and Arial for dyslexia piece — but the font picker works per-selection rather than globally. Changing the default body font for all new pages requires digging into the Options dialog in the desktop app (File > Options > General > Default font), and even then it only applies to new pages, not existing ones.

Where OneNote does better than its reputation suggests is on background colour. The desktop app ships with a set of page colour presets (View > Page Colour) that include parchment, yellow, blue, and green — not just pure white. The yellow preset in particular lands very close to the warm cream value that many readers with visual stress prefer. This is a feature most competing apps lack entirely.

Line spacing is the weakest link. The only control is Paragraph Spacing inside the Home tab, which gives you "before" and "after" values but no line-height slider. You can work around this by pasting text into Word, fixing the line height there, and pasting back — but that is not a sustainable workflow. For note-taking sessions where you write more than you paste, the spacing is mostly whatever the default is, and the default is tight.

One overlooked strength: OneNote on Windows has a built-in Immersive Reader that reflows any page of notes into a full-screen reading mode with Lexend, an adjustable column width, syllable highlighting, and line focus. It lives under View > Immersive Reader. It is essentially a reading-mode designed for dyslexia, built into a note-taking app, and very few people know it is there. If you are on Windows and already in the Microsoft ecosystem, that feature alone may make OneNote the right choice for the review half of your workflow even if you use something else for capture.

Notion

Notion is the app many people land on because it does almost everything — databases, kanban boards, documents, wikis, task lists — inside one interface. For dyslexic users, that breadth is a mixed blessing. More interface means more small text to scan, more sidebar navigation, more switching between contexts.

Typography in Notion is constrained. The app offers three built-in fonts: its default sans-serif (a version of Inter), a monospace, and a serif. None of these are purpose-built for legibility under dyslexia, and there is no option to add a custom font from the settings panel. The "small text" toggle makes the body slightly smaller; the "full width" toggle extends the line across the full browser width, which can help or hurt depending on your preferred line length.

What Notion does have is a dark mode (System / Light / Dark) and per-page background colour blocks — you can make a callout box with a yellow or blue background that stands out as a visual anchor. That is not the same as changing the page background, but it is a useful technique for flagging key passages. For a thorough look at what Notion offers and how to configure it for reading-heavy workflows, see our guide to reading Notion with dyslexia.

The practical workaround for Notion's font limitation is a Chrome extension. Because Notion's web app renders in the browser, a font-override extension can substitute Lexend or Atkinson Hyperlegible for Notion's default Inter across the entire app — including the sidebar, the page body, and the database views. This is covered in more detail in the section on the Chrome layer below.

Notion's spacing is set via a combination of the app's own block padding and the browser's default text rendering, so it lands somewhere between 1.4 and 1.5× — more generous than Google Docs at single spacing, less precise than a tool with an explicit slider.

Obsidian

Obsidian is the clearest winner on typography control, and by a meaningful margin. The Appearance settings panel lets you set a separate font for the interface (navigation, sidebars, headings) and a separate font for the editor body, with distinct size sliders for each. If Lexend is installed on your system, it appears in the dropdown immediately. Atkinson Hyperlegible and OpenDyslexic also work. The editor body font applies globally — every note, every folder, no per-note tweaking required.

Line height is also explicit: a slider under Editor > Editor font size controls the line-height multiplier for the editor. This is the kind of direct control that matters — you can set 1.5× and know the app is actually rendering it rather than guessing from a "comfortable" preset.

Background colour is handled through themes. Obsidian has a large community theme library, and several themes ship with built-in light variants in cream, warm grey, or soft yellow. The Minimal theme and its companion plugin (Minimal Theme Settings) let you pick a custom background hex value from inside the settings panel, which is the most direct implementation of the cream background technique described in our background colours guide.

The trade-off is the learning curve. Obsidian stores notes as plain Markdown files on your hard drive, which is excellent for longevity and portability, but means the initial setup — themes, plugins, sync — takes an afternoon rather than five minutes. For users who are already comfortable with Markdown or who keep long, structured notes, the typography control justifies that investment. For users who want to open an app and start writing within 30 seconds, Obsidian is probably not the right starting point.

Bear (and Apple Notes)

Bear is a clean, focused writing app with a strong Apple design sensibility. Its font support is more limited than Obsidian's — you choose from a curated set of five typefaces rather than any system font — but the set includes a humanist sans-serif (Avenir) and a monospace, and the editor renders at a generous default size with comfortable line spacing. Bear also has a paragraph width setting that keeps lines short by default, which benefits readers who find wide columns hard to track: the same concern we covered in line length and dyslexia.

Bear's themes include several that use off-white or warm backgrounds. The "Duotone Light" and "Solarized Light" themes in particular provide a cream-adjacent reading surface without requiring any customisation. These are baked into the app — no plugin required.

Apple Notes, the built-in option, is even simpler. You can change the body text size system-wide (it respects macOS Dynamic Type), and Apple Notes on Mac inherits your system font scaling. But there is no custom font option, no background colour, and no line-height control. It is a reasonable place to capture a quick thought; it is not a place to do serious reading-back of long notes if font control matters to you.

A demo: the same note in three rendering contexts

The text is the same in all three. The second and third examples demonstrate what even a one-afternoon setup in Obsidian or a Chrome override on Notion can produce.

The Chrome layer: overriding fonts in web-based apps

Notion, the Obsidian web companion app, and OneNote's browser version are all web apps. That means a Chrome font-override extension can substitute your preferred font for every note you read, regardless of what the app's settings panel allows. This is the same approach we describe in how to change the font on any website in Chrome: the browser intercepts the font declarations before they render and replaces them with Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, or OpenDyslexic.

For Notion specifically, this is often the most practical route. You do not need to wait for Notion to add a custom font option — you install LexiFont, scope it to notion.so, and every note body switches font within seconds. Because LexiFont lets you configure per-domain rules, you can have Lexend on Notion and Atkinson Hyperlegible on your CMS and a different setting on sites you just browse — without changing anything manually when you switch tabs.

The trade-off worth knowing: the Chrome layer affects the reading surface but not printed output or exports. If you export a Notion page to PDF, the PDF will reflect the app's own font, not your override. For reading back notes on screen, this is rarely an issue. For sharing notes with others or archiving as PDFs, it is worth checking what the export looks like before you rely on the system.

Which app to choose

The honest answer depends on two things: how long your typical note is, and how much setup time you are willing to spend once.

If you write long, structured notes — meeting summaries, reading notes, research outlines — and you can spare an afternoon of setup, Obsidian gives you the most typographic control of any mainstream note-taking app. The font picker, the line-height slider, and the community themes together get you as close to an ideal reading surface as any app on this list. The notes are stored as plain text files, which means they will outlast the app itself.

If you are already embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem and use Windows, OneNote's Immersive Reader is an underrated feature. The capture experience is average; the reading-back experience, once you flip to Immersive Reader, is genuinely good. Pair it with the desktop app's default font setting and the page colour options and it is serviceable for most workflows.

If your notes live in Notion because the rest of your team does too, the Chrome layer is your friend. Notion itself will not give you a Lexend setting. The browser will. This is also where LexiFont Pro earns its keep for heavy Notion users — per-site rules mean your note-taking app gets its own font setting without disturbing anything else.

Bear is the right choice if you are on a Mac, prefer a polished native app, and want comfortable defaults without a complex setup. It will not give you OpenDyslexic or Atkinson Hyperlegible, but its built-in rendering is more generous than most apps and several of its themes handle the background-colour problem.

A note on mobile note-taking

The same apps have mobile versions, and the mobile picture is different. Obsidian's iOS app respects your vault's theme and font settings if you sync your vault to the phone, so the reading experience can be continuous. Notion's iOS app uses its own font rendering, and the Chrome layer does not apply to the native app (only to the website in a mobile browser). OneNote's mobile app is lean and has fewer controls than the desktop version.

For iOS users generally, the system-wide approach — turning up Dynamic Type to "Larger" or "Accessibility Sizes" — reaches further than any per-app setting. We cover this and the rest of the mobile picture in reading on mobile with dyslexia.

Starting point: a 15-minute setup

If you want to pick one app and get it working today, the shortest path is this: if you use Chrome and an existing web-based tool, install LexiFont and point it at your note-taking domain — that is a two-minute change that improves your reading surface without switching apps at all. If you are willing to try something new, download Obsidian, install Atkinson Hyperlegible or Lexend from your OS's font manager, and open Obsidian's Appearance settings. You will have a better reading surface than most dedicated word processors within 15 minutes, and the notes you write there will be plain text files you can open anywhere for the rest of your life.

Typography should not be an afterthought in a tool you spend hours in each day. For dyslexic readers, it is often the difference between a workflow that drains you and one that does not.

Further reading

• Best fonts for dyslexia in 2026 - a research-first guide
• Dyslexia-friendly Google Docs setup - the settings that actually help
• Reading Notion with dyslexia - a setup that actually works
• Line spacing and letter spacing for dyslexia - what actually matters
• Dyslexia tools for university students - laptop setup guide