Blog · Study & Productivity
Dyslexia tools for university students — how to set up your laptop for easier reading
University is, in large part, a reading job. The volume alone is the problem — hundreds of pages per week across journal articles, textbooks, lecture notes, and reading list PDFs that arrive as scanned images. If you have dyslexia, that volume hits harder than it does for other students, because each page costs more effort. The good news is that the laptop sitting in front of you can be configured, right now, to cut that effort substantially. This guide walks through every layer: browser, PDF reader, note-taking app, text-to-speech, and system settings.
One clarification upfront: these tools manage fatigue and reduce friction. They do not substitute for the accommodations your university's disability office can provide — extra time in exams, accessible formats for reading lists, and similar. If you haven't already registered, do that first. The tools here complement those accommodations; they don't replace them.
Why university reading is especially hard with dyslexia
Three things converge at university that don't apply to most casual reading. First, the texts are dense and unfamiliar — academic writing uses long sentences, technical vocabulary, and minimal signposting. Your working memory is doing more work per line than it would on a news article. Second, the volume is non-negotiable — you can't skim a primary source the way you can skim a blog post. Third, the format is often terrible. Reading lists exist as photocopied pages scanned to PDF, uploaded to a portal at 96dpi, displayed in a browser tab that ignores your system font preferences entirely.
Each of these is solvable. Let's go through them in the order you'll encounter them.
1. The browser: your most important reading surface
Most academic portals, journal access pages, and university library systems live in the browser. That makes the browser the single highest-leverage place to invest in accessibility. Two categories of changes matter: font and spacing.
Font: override the site's default
Journal websites and university portals almost never consider dyslexic readers when they pick their body fonts. You'll encounter Georgia, Times New Roman, or tight sans-serifs like Arial at small sizes. All of these are harder to read than the purpose-designed dyslexia-friendly alternatives. The practical fix is a Chrome extension that applies your preferred font to every website automatically, without you having to do anything per page.
LexiFont applies OpenDyslexic — or whichever font you prefer — to every site you visit, with one click. If you find OpenDyslexic's weighted-bottom letter shapes helpful for letter-confusion issues, you can set it as your default and never think about fonts again. If you prefer something that blends in more while still being more readable, Lexend or Atkinson Hyperlegible are available in LexiFont Pro.
The practical difference is not subtle. Here's what a typical paragraph of academic text looks like in a default journal font versus a dyslexia-optimised font:
Same sentence, same screen. The Lexend version has wider letter spacing baked in, a slightly taller x-height, and more breathing room between lines. For a paragraph, the difference is minor. Across two hours of solid reading, it compounds significantly.
Spacing and line length
Academic websites frequently use very wide line lengths — 90 to 110 characters per line — because no one constrained the text column width. Long lines force your eye to travel further on each line and make it harder to find the start of the next one. This is a known issue for dyslexic readers independent of font choice. If your browser extension lets you control line length and line height, set the column width to around 65–75 characters and line height to at least 1.5. Most dyslexic readers find 1.7–1.8 the sweet spot.
2. PDFs: the worst format, made manageable
University reading lists are overwhelmingly PDF. PDFs are a particular problem for dyslexic readers because the font, size, and layout are locked into the file. You cannot simply override them the way you can override a web page's CSS. Your options depend on what kind of PDF you're dealing with.
Text-based PDFs
If the PDF was created digitally (not scanned), you can extract the text and reflow it into a format you control. The easiest route in Chrome is to open the PDF in the browser's built-in viewer and use your browser's reader mode if available, or copy-paste sections into Google Docs. Google Docs will accept pasted PDF text and you can then adjust the font, size, and spacing to your preference — see the section on Google Docs below.
A more systematic approach: open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat (free tier is sufficient for reading) and turn on Accessibility > Read Out Loud for any section you're struggling with. Acrobat's Reflow view (View > Zoom > Reflow) also strips the fixed layout and presents the text as a simple scrollable column, which you can then zoom without the text running off screen.
Scanned PDFs
A scanned PDF is an image. The text cannot be selected or copied because it is not text — it is pixels. This is extremely common with older journal articles and library course packs. You have two options. The first is to request the accessible version from your university library; many libraries have digital versions of everything on the reading list, and disability accommodations often include priority access to these. The second is to run the PDF through OCR (optical character recognition) to convert it to real text. Adobe Acrobat Pro includes an OCR tool. There are also free web services — search for "PDF OCR" — though be careful about uploading sensitive documents to third-party servers.
Once OCR has run, the resulting text-layer PDF can be reflowed, read aloud, or copy-pasted into a format you control.
3. Google Docs and Microsoft Word: where you write, and where you read
Your lecture notes, essay drafts, and shared seminar documents all live in Google Docs or Word. Both can be configured for dyslexia-friendly reading.
In Google Docs, go to Format > Paragraph styles > Normal text > Update "Normal text" to match — set your font (Lexend or Atkinson Hyperlegible are available in the Docs font menu), size (at least 14pt for reading, 12pt if you need to match a submission format), and line spacing to 1.5 or 2.0. This becomes your default for every new document. You can also use the Page setup to narrow the margins and reduce line length.
In Word, the equivalent is to modify the Normal style: right-click Normal in the Styles pane, choose Modify, set your font and size, and check "New documents based on this template" so the setting persists. Word also includes Immersive Reader (View > Immersive Reader), which reflows the current document in a clean single-column view with controllable line focus, text spacing, and syllable splitting. It's underused by most students and genuinely good for slow, careful reading of complex text.
4. Note-taking: reading and writing at the same time
Most dyslexic students find that taking notes while reading is more effortful than for other students, because it splits attention between decoding the source and formulating the note. Two strategies help.
The first is to read a section fully before taking any notes. Rather than pausing every paragraph to write, read the whole section — or chapter, if you can — and then summarise it in your own words. This uses more working memory in the reading phase but reduces the context-switching overhead. Working memory is often a bottleneck for dyslexic readers, so spending it on comprehension rather than splitting it across two tasks tends to produce better notes and better retention.
The second is to dictate rather than type your notes. Every major operating system has good dictation built in — Windows Speech Recognition (Win + H), macOS Dictation (set up in System Settings > Keyboard), and ChromeOS's Google Voice Typing. Dictating a summary of what you just read is faster than typing it for most people, and it activates a different verbal channel that can help consolidate the reading.
For apps: Notion, Obsidian, and Bear all allow custom fonts via settings or CSS overrides. In Notion, you can go to Settings > Appearance and toggle "Use system font." In Obsidian, you can specify your font directly in Settings > Appearance > Text font. Setting your dyslexia-friendly font here means your notes inherit the same readable presentation as your browser reading.
5. Text-to-speech: a complement, not a crutch
Text-to-speech (TTS) is one of the most effective study tools for dyslexic students, and it is frequently underused because students feel it is "cheating" or a sign of weakness. It is neither. Listening to text while following along with your eyes is a well-established technique for improving reading accuracy, comprehension, and retention — it is effectively how audiobooks work, and the research on dual reading is consistently positive.
For Chrome, several TTS extensions read any selected text aloud. The best ones highlight each word as it is spoken, which keeps your visual attention anchored. For PDFs, Acrobat's Read Out Loud and Microsoft Edge's built-in "Read Aloud" (which works directly on PDFs opened in Edge) are both solid options and require no extra installation.
Where TTS is particularly valuable for university work: reading a primary source the second time. If you've read a journal article once and understood the argument, listening to it on TTS while doing something low-demand (making tea, walking to a lecture) reinforces the structure without requiring another full focused reading session.
6. Research papers and long-form academic reading
Long academic papers have a structure you can exploit. The abstract gives you the research question and the answer. The introduction gives you the background and hypothesis. The discussion gives you the interpretation. The conclusion gives you the implications. If you read in this order — abstract, conclusion, discussion, introduction, methods, results — you arrive at the detailed sections already knowing what they are trying to prove, which dramatically reduces the cognitive load of decoding dense methodology sections.
This is not a shortcut; it is how experienced researchers read. For more on reading academic papers with dyslexia, the linked post covers this reading order in more detail, as well as how to handle papers that have no clear signposting.
7. System-level settings: your laptop's built-in tools
Beyond browser extensions and individual apps, both Windows and macOS have system-level accessibility settings that apply everywhere — including apps that don't have their own accessibility options.
macOS
System Settings > Accessibility > Display > Reduce Motion, Reduce Transparency, and Increase Contrast are all worth trying. More relevant for reading: System Settings > Accessibility > Zoom lets you set a cursor-following zoom window that magnifies whatever you're hovering over — useful for reading small text without changing the global zoom level of the app. For font overrides across native apps, macOS does not have a global system font setting in the same way Windows does, which is why a browser extension remains the most reliable lever for web reading.
Windows
Settings > Ease of Access > Text size lets you scale text across all apps independently of the display scale. Setting this to 125% or 150% increases font size everywhere — including apps and dialogs that otherwise ignore zoom settings — without making the entire display feel small. Settings > Ease of Access > Colour filters includes a greyscale mode and colour inversion; some readers find that a light sepia filter (closest in Windows is the colour filter set to "Grayscale inverted" or a third-party utility) reduces glare from white backgrounds. Night Light (Settings > Display > Night Light) shifts the screen colour temperature warmer after sunset, which many readers find reduces eye strain during evening study sessions.
8. Focus and attention alongside reading
Dyslexia and ADHD co-occur at higher rates than chance — estimates vary, but roughly 40% of people diagnosed with dyslexia also meet criteria for ADHD. If focus and sustained attention are part of your picture alongside the reading difficulty, the setup for reading tools for ADHD covers some additional strategies: focus modes in browsers, distraction-blocking extensions, and the case for shorter focused reading sessions with deliberate breaks.
Even without an ADHD diagnosis, most dyslexic readers find that reading in focused 25-minute sessions — taking a 5-minute break between chunks — produces significantly better comprehension than grinding through 90 minutes continuously. The break is not wasted time; it is when consolidation happens.
9. A practical setup checklist
If you want to implement everything above, here's the order that takes least total time:
- Install LexiFont in Chrome and set your preferred reading font (OpenDyslexic, Lexend, or Atkinson Hyperlegible). This applies to every website immediately.
- In Chrome settings (chrome://settings/fonts), set your default serif and sans-serif fonts to Lexend or Atkinson Hyperlegible as a fallback for sites LexiFont doesn't cover.
- In Google Docs, update your Normal text style: Lexend or Atkinson Hyperlegible at 14pt, line spacing 1.5.
- In Word, modify the Normal style the same way and enable Immersive Reader for heavy reading sessions.
- Set up dictation on your OS — it takes five minutes and you'll use it immediately.
- On macOS, turn on Zoom in Accessibility settings. On Windows, increase Text size to 125% or 150% in Ease of Access.
- Enable Night Light or the equivalent at 6500K during daytime reading, shifting to 4000K in the evening.
- For long-form reading, try a deliberate reading workflow: read abstract and conclusion first, then introduction, then the rest.
- For reading PDFs, open them in Edge for the built-in Read Aloud, or in Acrobat with Reflow mode on.
- Register with your disability office if you haven't — most universities will convert reading list PDFs to accessible formats on request.
What not to do
A few common moves that don't help as much as they seem. Increasing your screen brightness does not make text easier to read and often makes it harder — high brightness on a white page increases glare. Lower it slightly and increase the text size instead. Installing every reading extension available will create conflicting CSS overrides and leave you with a browser that behaves unpredictably on every new site. Pick one font extension and stick with it. And don't assume that the accommodation the disability office provides — extra time in exams, say — is the only support available. Accessible format requests, mentoring, and tutorial support are often available to students who haven't asked.
The goal is sustainable reading
The point of every tool in this guide is to make reading less draining per page, so that you can read the same volume your peers are reading without finishing each session exhausted. That is not about getting an unfair advantage — it is about arriving at the same baseline. A student without dyslexia reading in a comfortable font at a comfortable size and spacing is not working hard at the decoding level; that energy is going straight into comprehension. The tools here are trying to give you the same deal.
If you're looking for a single starting point, the browser font is the highest-leverage change you can make in the next two minutes. LexiFont is free for a single font and available in the Chrome Web Store. LexiFont Pro unlocks Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, Comic Neue, and custom spacing controls — useful if you want to fine-tune your reading experience across an entire semester of heavy reading.