Blog · Workplace
Dyslexia accommodations at work - what to request and how to set up your laptop
Most guides on dyslexia accommodations at work focus on the legal framework - your rights, your employer's obligations, the process. That's worth knowing. But the formal process is slow, and you have to read and write at work every day right now. This guide covers both: the software setup you can do today without asking anyone, and the reasonable adjustments worth formally requesting when you're ready.
What counts as a reasonable adjustment
In many countries, dyslexia qualifies as a disability in a workplace context. The UK's Equality Act 2010, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the EU's Employment Equality Directive, and comparable legislation in Australia and Canada all place an obligation on employers to make "reasonable adjustments" or "reasonable accommodations" when a disability affects how someone performs their job.
In practice, what counts as reasonable scales with the employer's size and resources. Software tools that cost nothing - a browser extension, a font override, a free text-to-speech tool - are almost never considered unreasonable. The harder conversations tend to involve time extensions on written tasks, funding for specialist coaching, or licensed assistive technology that runs to several hundred pounds or dollars annually.
A few things worth knowing before you approach anyone formally:
You are not required to disclose a dyslexia diagnosis to access workplace support in most jurisdictions. You can describe a "processing difference that affects reading speed and accuracy" without naming it. The adjustment stands or falls on whether it's reasonable, not on what label you attach to your difficulty.
The formal process - an occupational health referral, a workplace needs assessment, HR paperwork - can take weeks or months. Start the software setup on your own machine today. Do not wait for a process to make your working week easier in the meantime. This is not about circumventing anything; it's about the fact that installing a browser extension doesn't require anyone's sign-off in most environments.
This article is practical guidance, not legal advice. The detail of what you're entitled to varies by jurisdiction, employer size, and your specific role. For UK employees, the charity ACAS has clear guidance on reasonable adjustments. For US employees, the Job Accommodation Network (JAN) maintains a searchable database of low-cost accommodations by disability type.
Start with your browser - the biggest gain, no approval required
If you work in a knowledge role, you almost certainly read a significant volume of material in a web browser every day: internal wikis, project management tools, HR systems, reference documentation, news you monitor for work. The browser is where you can make the largest single improvement to your reading environment, and you can do it without involving anyone else.
A font-override extension lets you replace any website's typeface with a dyslexia-friendlier one - OpenDyslexic, Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, or Comic Neue. LexiFont does this in Chrome: you pick your font, set it globally or per-site, and every page you open renders in that font. There's no back-end involved, nothing leaves your machine, and it works on every website with no per-site configuration.
For an overview of what these fonts actually do differently, see our guide to how to change the font on any website in Chrome.
On most corporate-managed machines, installing a Chrome extension from the Chrome Web Store is permitted. Where it isn't - some large organisations lock extension installation to an IT-approved allowlist - requesting access to a specific accessibility extension is itself a reasonable adjustment, and a low-cost one. Worth framing it that way.
If you find that fonts alone don't address everything, also consider adjusting line spacing and letter spacing. Many dyslexic readers find that wider line and letter spacing reduces crowding effects significantly, and LexiFont's Pro tier lets you tune these values per-site on top of the font change.
Text-to-speech for reading-heavy days
One of the less-discussed costs of dyslexia in the workplace is reading fatigue. The cognitive overhead of decoding dense text - specifications, policy documents, long email threads - accumulates across a workday in a way that most non-dyslexic colleagues don't experience. By early afternoon, what should be a quick read of a four-page report can feel like wading through concrete.
Text-to-speech (TTS) offloads that decoding work. You can listen while you read, or just listen. The content registers differently - often more completely - because you're not spending working memory on letter recognition. For many dyslexic adults, TTS is the single accommodation that makes long-form reading at work sustainable.
For Chrome, a full guide to TTS setup is here. The short version: Read Aloud and Natural Reader both have well-regarded free tiers. You select a passage of text, hit the shortcut, and it reads. Most voices have improved substantially in the past few years - the robotic quality that made early TTS harder to follow than reading is largely gone from the better engines.
If your office has open-plan seating, using TTS means headphones. Some workplaces have informal norms against headphone use, or management styles where it's frowned upon. This is worth naming explicitly if you make a formal accommodation request: "I use a text-to-speech tool for reading heavy documents, which requires headphones" is a legitimate accessibility need. Headphones for TTS are easy to approve.
Email: the daily reading load that never ends
Email is where most knowledge workers spend more reading time than anywhere else. It's also one of the worst reading environments: variable fonts set by senders, dense threading, quoted text nested three levels deep, and typically no spacing controls available to the recipient.
If you use Gmail in Chrome, LexiFont's font override applies to the inbox and message view just as it does to any other site. Pair this with Gmail's "Comfortable" display density setting (the gear icon, then "Density") to add vertical space between messages - this alone reduces visual compression considerably. See the full guide to making Gmail easier to read with dyslexia for the complete setup.
If you use Microsoft Outlook, the picture is slightly more complicated but manageable. The web version of Outlook (used in Microsoft 365 environments) responds to Chrome font overrides. The native desktop app has its own accessibility panel under File > Options > Ease of Access, where you can set your preferred reading font and increase spacing. For the full setup, the guide to reading Outlook with dyslexia in Chrome walks through both paths.
One underused setting in both clients: switching the reading pane to open messages in a separate window rather than an inline preview. Inline previews often inherit the sender's formatting; a separate window gives the font override more room to operate.
Documents and long-form writing
If you spend significant time reading or writing in Microsoft Word, the dyslexia settings in Word are worth setting up properly. Word's built-in "Immersive Reader" (available in the View tab) lets you set the font, increase spacing, and even enable syllable highlighting - useful features that don't require any extensions. The Learning Tools add-in extends this further with column-width control and text colouring.
For Google Docs users, the Docs interface itself has limited typography controls - you can change the default font but not the line spacing globally in a way that persists across documents. LexiFont's font override applies to the Docs editor in Chrome, though it applies to the entire interface, not just the document body. The guide to a dyslexia-friendly Google Docs setup covers the combination of Docs settings and Chrome-level overrides that tends to work best.
For composing rather than reading: speech-to-text dictation is one of the highest-value tools available to dyslexic writers, and it's now built into both major operating systems at no cost. On Windows, Win + H opens the voice typing panel. On macOS, pressing Fn twice activates dictation. Neither requires any additional software. The accuracy on both has reached a level where editing the transcript is faster than typing for most users, even those without dyslexia.
Collaboration and chat tools
If your team uses Microsoft Teams, you're likely reading a significant volume of chat messages, notifications, and shared documents inside the Teams interface. The chat sidebar during a video meeting - where you're trying to follow conversation while reading incoming messages - is a well-documented difficulty for dyslexic readers. The setup guide for reading Teams with dyslexia covers the available font and zoom controls inside Teams, plus how to use Chrome's font override on the Teams web app.
Slack in a browser responds to font overrides in the same way. If your team uses Slack desktop, the font override won't apply - but Slack's own settings (Preferences > Accessibility) include text scaling and a "Full screen" mode that increases the content column width and reduces sidebar visual noise.
What to formally request from HR or your manager
Once you've done the self-service setup, you'll have a clearer picture of what's still hard. That clarity makes the formal conversation easier - you can describe specific friction points rather than speaking in generalities.
The following accommodations are almost universally considered reasonable, cost little or nothing, and rarely face pushback from well-intentioned employers:
- Permission to install specific accessibility browser extensions (if your organisation restricts this by default)
- Use of headphones for text-to-speech during the workday
- Written rather than only verbal instructions for multi-step tasks, assignments, or processes
- Extra time on written assessments, timed written exercises in interviews or performance cycles
- Ability to use voice dictation software for composing work documents
- Confirmation that you can use personal noise-cancelling headphones in open-plan environments
The following tend to require more formal process, evidence of need, and sometimes an occupational health assessment:
- Employer-funded licensed software (Dragon Professional dictation, Read&Write Gold, ClaroRead)
- Access to a workplace dyslexia coach or specialist tutor
- Dedicated quiet space for reading-heavy tasks
- Extended deadlines on written deliverables as a standing arrangement
If you're early in your career and coming from a university environment where you had formal DSA (Disabled Students' Allowance) support or similar funding, it's worth knowing that none of that support carries over automatically into employment. The tools overlap, but the process is entirely separate. The guide to dyslexia tools for university students covers the academic side in more detail; many of the same tools apply at work, but you'll need to make the case fresh.
How to phrase it when you're not ready to fully disclose
Many adults with dyslexia go years without formally disclosing at work, either because they've had discouraging past experiences or because they're uncertain about how it will affect how they're perceived. That calculation is personal and reasonable. You can access most software-level accommodations without any formal disclosure.
For low-friction conversations about specific tools, this framing tends to work well:
"I have a reading processing difference that affects how I work through dense text. I've found that a couple of browser tools - a font override extension and a text-to-speech tool - significantly improve my reading accuracy and reduce the time I spend on long documents. Neither costs anything and neither affects anyone else. Is there any issue with me installing these on my work machine?"
You don't need to say "dyslexia." You don't need to produce documentation. You're describing a functional adjustment to your working environment, not applying for a formal programme. Most reasonable managers and IT departments will say yes without further questions. If they don't, that tells you something useful about whether a more formal route is worth pursuing.
A realistic five-step setup you can finish today
If you're starting from scratch, here's the order that gives the most return for the time invested:
- Install LexiFont and set your preferred reading font globally. Start with the font that fits your specific difficulty - OpenDyslexic if letter confusion is the issue, Lexend or Atkinson Hyperlegible if it's more about reading speed and fatigue. Use it for a full week before adjusting.
- Install a TTS extension (Read Aloud is free and simple) and use it for one long document you'd normally read twice. Notice whether listening helps comprehension or just moves the effort around.
- Set your document font to Lexend or Atkinson Hyperlegible in Microsoft Word (Home tab > Styles > Normal > Modify) or Google Docs (Format > Paragraph Styles > Normal Text). This affects every new document you create.
- In Gmail or Outlook web, switch to the most spacious display density available. In Gmail, this is the gear icon > Display density > Comfortable. In Outlook web, Settings > View > Message spacing > Spacious. This adds vertical breathing room to message lists at zero cognitive cost.
- Try voice dictation for one day of email composition. Windows: Win + H. macOS: Fn twice. You may write faster and with fewer errors than typing from the first session.
None of these require IT support, employer approval, or any formal process. You can have them all running before your next meeting. The formal accommodation conversation - if you want to have it - can happen alongside or after you've already made your working day more manageable.
For the full font and spacing controls including per-site adjustments and the expanded font library, LexiFont Pro is available as a one-time purchase and covers every site you read at work.