Blog · Typography

Dyslexia-friendly fonts for presentations — PowerPoint, Google Slides, and Keynote

11 min read · July 1, 2026

Most presentation templates ship with fonts chosen for visual impact on a projector, not for readability by someone in the audience who has dyslexia. Thin letterforms, tight spacing, and dark-slide-on-dark-text combinations are common. This guide covers which fonts to use in each major presentation tool, how large to set them, and the spacing and contrast tweaks that make slides genuinely readable rather than merely visible.

Why presentations are especially hard for dyslexic readers

Reading a slide is not the same as reading a document. You are typically reading from a distance — either across a meeting room or on a screen that is shared as a thumbnail. You have no control over the font, the size, or the spacing. And you're reading while simultaneously listening, which competes for the working-memory resources that dyslexic readers already have to budget carefully.

The problem compounds in three ways. First, the presenter usually moves on before a slow reader has finished parsing the slide. Second, many slide decks use decorative fonts for headings — thin serifs, condensed sans-serifs, or display typefaces — that look polished on screen but fragment into ambiguous letterforms at small sizes. Third, slides often use colour contrasts that fail even basic accessibility thresholds: white text on a medium-grey background, or dark text on a dark-tinted photo.

None of this is malicious. It's a side-effect of presentation software defaults optimised for aesthetic punch rather than reading ease. The good news is that fixing it takes under five minutes per deck if you know which settings to change — and the fixes make the slides look cleaner, not worse.

What makes a font work on a slide

The principles overlap with what makes a font work for dyslexia on screen in general (see our guide to the best fonts for dyslexia in 2026), but with a few extra constraints:

No ambiguous letterforms. The lowercase l, the numeral 1, and the capital I must be visually distinct. Similarly, 0 and O, and the b/d/p/q group that many dyslexic readers report as visually unstable. Fonts like Calibri and Arial do reasonably well here at large sizes but start to blur on small-size labels and footnotes.

Open apertures. Letters like c, e, a, and s should have clearly open counters — the space inside the curve. Closed apertures mean letters look more alike and demand more work to distinguish.

Consistent stroke width. Highly modulated typefaces (thick-thin contrast in the stroke) introduce fine strokes that disappear under poor projector calibration or low-res screen sharing. A humanist sans or a purpose-built legibility font with near-uniform stroke weight stays readable even when the display degrades.

Generous x-height. A large x-height — the relative size of lowercase letters compared to capitals — makes word recognition faster because the lowercase forms carry most of the reading information. Fonts like Lexend and Atkinson Hyperlegible both have notably tall x-heights. We cover why this matters in our piece on serif vs sans-serif fonts for dyslexic readers.

The best fonts by platform

PowerPoint

PowerPoint ships with a large font library, and Microsoft 365 users get access to even more via the online font panel. The best choices available by default:

Aptos (formerly Bierstadt) is Microsoft's current default since 2023 and a genuine improvement on its predecessors. It has a large x-height, open apertures, and clear letterform differentiation. If you are using an organisation template that forces Aptos, you are already in decent shape — just make sure the size and spacing are right.

Calibri was the previous Microsoft default and remains a solid choice. The optical interpolation at small sizes is good, and the a and g forms are the humanist double-storey versions that are easier to distinguish than the single-storey alternatives. It is not purpose-built for dyslexia but it sits in the same zone of legibility as most of the recommendation lists put out by dyslexia charities.

Verdana was designed specifically for screen readability at small sizes and, thirty years after its creation, still holds up. Its wide letter spacing and unusually large x-height make it one of the more dyslexia-friendly options available natively in Office. The width of Verdana characters means you fit fewer words per line, which is actually a feature for slide text: it forces you to write less.

Franklin Gothic Book deserves mention for its clear distinction between I, l, and 1, and its open, round apertures. It is installed on most Windows machines and prints well at both large headline sizes and smaller body copy.

For users who want to go further, Lexend and Atkinson Hyperlegible are both available free from Google Fonts and installable on Windows and Mac. Lexend was specifically engineered to reduce visual stress and improve reading fluency — it widens individual letters and adds spacing between them at the glyph level so the effect is consistent regardless of what line-spacing setting you use. We have a full profile of Lexend for dyslexic readers and of Atkinson Hyperlegible if you want to read the design rationale before installing.

Google Slides

Google Slides uses Google Fonts, and access to the full catalogue is built in — click the font dropdown, then "More fonts." This makes it the easiest of the three platforms to set up well.

Lexend is the first recommendation. Add it via "More fonts," search for Lexend, and you get the full variable family. Use Lexend Deca or Lexend at weight 400 for body copy and weight 600 for headings. The consistent letterform width and generous spacing mean it is readable even in the thumbnail view of a shared screen during a video call.

Atkinson Hyperlegible, designed by the Braille Institute specifically for readers with low vision and reading difficulties, is also available in Google Fonts. Its primary strength is extreme letterform differentiation — every character is designed to be unmistakable. The I/l/1 distinction, in particular, is exceptionally clear. See our Atkinson Hyperlegible deep-dive for detail on how it differs from a standard humanist sans.

Nunito is a rounded sans-serif with a generous x-height that many readers find comfortable. It is not purpose-built for dyslexia but it avoids most of the problematic design choices — thin strokes, closed apertures, ambiguous letter pairs — and the rounded terminals give it a softer feel that some readers find less tiring over long presentations.

OpenDyslexic is not in the Google Fonts catalogue but can be added to Google Slides indirectly: install it as a system font on the machine you use to present (it is free from opendyslexic.org), and it will appear in the "Fonts installed on your computer" section of the Slides font picker. This is the right choice if the audience includes people who specifically find letter-rotation confusing — it is the only font in this list that actively targets the b/d/p/q confusion that is the hallmark of phonological dyslexia.

Keynote (Mac and iOS)

Keynote has access to the full macOS font library, which includes every font installed on the system. The defaults lean toward Apple's own San Francisco family.

SF Pro (San Francisco) is Apple's system font and the default in Keynote. It is a competent humanist sans with good legibility at presentation sizes. Its letterform differentiation is not exceptional — the capital I is a plain vertical bar without serifs — but at 24pt and above it reads clearly. For a general audience it is a reasonable default; for a specifically dyslexic audience, it is worth replacing.

Gill Sans ships with macOS and appears in many Apple presentation templates. Despite being a classic typeface, it is one of the weaker choices here: its lowercase a uses a single-storey design that is easy to confuse with the letter o at a glance, and its capital I is a plain vertical bar. Avoid it as body copy for a mixed audience.

Lexend and Atkinson Hyperlegible are both installable on Mac via the system Font Book (download the TTF from Google Fonts, double-click to install) and then available immediately in Keynote. The process takes under two minutes and is the single highest-impact change you can make to a Keynote presentation for a dyslexic audience.

Size, spacing, and contrast — the settings that matter as much as the font

Choosing the right font family is necessary but not sufficient. The settings below are equally important, and they apply to all three platforms.

Font size

The common advice — "make slides readable from the back of the room" — is correct but underspecified. As a working guide: body copy on a slide should be no smaller than 24pt on a standard 16:9 slide viewed from a typical meeting-room distance. Headings should be 36pt or above. In practice, most slide templates land at these sizes or larger; the failure mode is usually footnotes, source citations, and caption text crammed in at 12–14pt, which is unreadable at distance for anyone and essentially invisible to readers with visual stress. Either cut the small text or increase it to 18pt minimum.

We have a dedicated article on font sizes for dyslexic adult readers that covers the reasoning behind size choices in different reading contexts.

Line spacing and letter spacing

All three platforms expose line spacing controls, and this is worth adjusting. Set line spacing to at least 1.4 on body-copy slides — 1.5 is better if the slide has room. Tight line spacing forces the eye to work harder to track the correct line, and line-tracking is already effortful for many dyslexic readers.

Letter spacing (tracking) is a separate control and harder to generalise. The research suggests that slightly expanded letter spacing — around 0.05em to 0.1em above default — reduces the visual crowding that makes letters blur together. In PowerPoint, this is under Format Shape > Text Box > Character Spacing; in Google Slides, it is under Format > Text > Letter spacing; in Keynote, it is in the text formatting sidebar as "Character Spacing." A setting of +1pt to +2pt on 28pt body copy is a reasonable starting point. Our guide to line and letter spacing explains the evidence in more detail.

Contrast and background colour

The darkest common mistake in slide design is low-contrast text: white or light-grey text on a medium-coloured background, or coloured text (navy, dark green) on a dark photo. WCAG 2.1 requires a 4.5:1 contrast ratio for normal text and 3:1 for large text — check yours with any free contrast-ratio tool before presenting.

Beyond the minimum, the colour temperature of the background matters. A pure white background can cause glare and visual stress under a bright projector beam. Cream or very light warm-grey backgrounds (around #fafaf6 to #f5f2ed) reduce glare without sacrificing contrast. Some dyslexic readers find pale blue, pale yellow, or pale peach backgrounds significantly more comfortable than white — this overlaps with the Irlen-syndrome literature on tinted overlays. Our article on background colours for dyslexia covers the evidence for different tints.

Slide density

Fewer words per slide is not just a design preference — it is a direct accessibility improvement. A slide with three bullets at 28pt and 1.5 line spacing is scannable in four seconds; a slide with six bullets at 20pt crammed together takes twelve seconds and forces the presenter to slow down or the audience to fall behind. For a mixed audience that includes dyslexic readers, the practical maximum is four short lines of body copy per slide, not eight.

A quick-reference table

Sharing slides: what happens when they leave your machine

One underappreciated problem: when you share a slide deck as a PDF, or send a PowerPoint file to someone else, the fonts you chose may not be present on their device. PowerPoint embeds fonts when you save if you check "Embed fonts in the file" in Save As options — do this every time. Google Slides renders in the browser and preserves fonts without any action required. Keynote exports to PDF with fonts embedded by default, but exported PowerPoint files may substitute fonts if the recipient does not have them installed.

When slides are viewed through a browser — Google Slides links, shared OneDrive URLs, embedded presentation iframes — they behave like any other webpage. If you are sharing presentations in a browser context and your audience includes people who use font-override tools, the font settings in the deck will typically be respected because the text renders as HTML, not as images. LexiFont, for example, lets readers apply their preferred dyslexia font (Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, OpenDyslexic, or others) to any website, which includes Google Slides viewed in the browser. It will not override a Keynote PDF, but it will apply to the live Google Slides viewer. If you want to encourage audience members with dyslexia to self-accommodate, the cleanest option is to share a Google Slides link rather than a PDF.

For readers who regularly need to apply their own font preferences to web-based content — not just presentations — LexiFont Pro adds per-site memory so the font choice persists automatically without needing to re-set it each session.

Font weight and emphasis

One last point that applies universally: use bold for emphasis rather than italics. Italic text is harder for many dyslexic readers — the slant introduces an extra layer of letter-shape ambiguity on top of the dyslexia-related confusion that already exists. Bold adds visual weight without changing the underlying letter shapes. This is covered in detail in our article on font weight and dyslexia. On slides, where space is tight and you want emphasis to be visible from across a room, bold is the only reliable option anyway.

Avoid ALL CAPS for more than three or four words. All-caps text removes the ascender and descender profile that word recognition relies on — every word becomes a rectangular block of the same height. Reading research consistently shows all-caps text is slower to parse and more effortful, particularly for dyslexic readers. We wrote specifically about all-caps and dyslexia if you want the full breakdown.

Further reading

• Best fonts for dyslexia in 2026 — the full research-first guide
• Lexend in Chrome — why it was built and how it performs
• Atkinson Hyperlegible — design principles and how to use it
• Line spacing and letter spacing for dyslexia — what the research says
• Background colours for dyslexia — cream, blue, grey, or white?