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Microsoft Word dyslexia settings — fonts, spacing, and Read Aloud
Word ships with a default look — Calibri 11pt, single spacing, narrow margins — that was designed for dense documents, not for comfortable reading. If you have dyslexia, that default is almost exactly the wrong starting point. The good news is that every setting that makes Word easier to read is a few clicks away, and you can save them as your personal default so you never start from a bad baseline again.
This guide covers the desktop versions of Microsoft Word (365 / 2021 / 2019) on Windows and macOS, and notes where Word for the Web differs. Screenshots are not included, but every instruction is precise enough to follow without them.
Quick win if you have two minutes: open any document, select all text (Ctrl+A / Cmd+A), change the font to Lexend or Atkinson Hyperlegible at 14pt, set line spacing to 1.5, and switch the page colour to a soft off-white (hex #F5F0E8). That alone is a meaningful improvement. The rest of this guide makes those changes permanent and adds the tools Word already has but buries.
Font choice: what to install and why
Word's built-in font list is long, but most of the options were designed for print at small sizes. For dyslexic readers the priorities are different: wide letter spacing, clear distinction between similar-looking letters, and enough x-height that ascenders and descenders don't crowd the letters. The research on serif vs sans-serif for dyslexic readers consistently favours clean sans-serif faces at screen sizes.
Three fonts work well in Word and are free to install:
Lexend — designed specifically for reading fluency research, with optical adjustments that open up naturally crowded letter pairs. Available for free at fonts.google.com. Once installed it appears in Word's font picker under "L". Use Lexend Regular or Lexend Light; avoid Lexend Bold for running text (it was designed for headings). Our full guide on Lexend in Chrome explains the design rationale.
Atkinson Hyperlegible — developed by the Braille Institute for readers with low vision. Each glyph is drawn to be unambiguous in isolation: the lowercase L, capital I, and numeral 1 are unmistakeable; b, d, p, and q have clear visual differentiation. Download from the Braille Institute's website or Google Fonts. A detailed comparison with Lexend is at Lexend vs Atkinson Hyperlegible.
OpenDyslexic — the open-source font with weighted letter bottoms. Some readers with significant letter-reversal difficulties prefer it over the options above; others find the unusual shapes distracting in long documents. Worth a ten-minute trial. Download from opendyslexic.org.
To install on Windows: right-click the downloaded .ttf file and choose "Install for all users." On macOS: double-click the font file and click "Install Font." Word picks up newly installed fonts the next time you launch it, without a restart.
Fonts to avoid for dyslexic reading: Times New Roman (tight letter spacing, serifs at small sizes), Arial Narrow (compressed letterforms), and any display or decorative font. Our piece on Times New Roman and dyslexia goes deeper on why the default academic font is a poor choice.
Font size
Most Word documents default to 11pt or 12pt. For comfortable on-screen reading with dyslexia, 14pt is a better starting point — it gives each letter enough physical space on screen that fine distinctions between similar glyphs stay visible. If you are reading rather than writing (proofing a document, reviewing a report) you can go to 16pt or even 18pt without any practical downside. See best font size for dyslexic adults for the fuller picture on size, viewing distance, and screen resolution.
Line spacing, paragraph spacing, and character spacing
Spacing is where Word's defaults are most unhelpful for dyslexic readers. The problem is crowding — when lines sit too close together, the eye loses its place on the return sweep at the end of a line, and the ascenders of one line visually merge with the descenders of the line above. The fix is simple but has to be applied deliberately.
Line spacing — what to set
Home tab → Paragraph group → Line and Paragraph Spacing button → choose 1.5 (or open "Line Spacing Options" for exact control).
For long documents you are reading rather than printing, 2.0 is more comfortable. For documents that will be printed and need to fit a page count, 1.5 is a reasonable compromise. Single spacing (the Word default) is appropriate only for print where space is genuinely constrained.
Avoid the "Exactly" option unless you know what you are doing — it disables automatic scaling and will clip tall letters in large fonts.
The research on line spacing and letter spacing suggests that extra inter-line space provides a more consistent benefit than any other typographic change — bigger even than font choice for many readers.
Character spacing (letter-spacing) — optional but useful
Select text → Home → Font (click the small arrow in the corner) → Advanced tab → Spacing: choose Expanded, set By: to 1pt or 1.5pt.
This adds a small gap between every character. One point is subtle; two points is noticeable. Avoid going past 2pt — the words start to look spaced-out and chunky, and reading rate drops. For a deeper look at what the research says, see word spacing and dyslexia.
Paragraph spacing
Home → Paragraph → Line and Paragraph Spacing → Add Space After Paragraph (or set "After: 12pt" in Paragraph Options).
This creates a visible gap between paragraphs without needing a blank line. Combined with 1.5 line spacing, it creates natural reading chunks that are easier to navigate.
Page colour and background
Black text on white paper works for most readers. For many dyslexic readers — and particularly those with visual stress or Irlen syndrome — it does not. The issue is not contrast itself (which WCAG recommends keeping high) but the optical "glare" that white backgrounds generate under bright screens. Some readers describe white pages as appearing to shimmer, ripple, or generate halos around letter shapes.
To change the page colour in Word: Design tab → Page Color → choose a custom colour. Recommended starting points:
| Colour | Hex | When it helps |
|---|---|---|
| Warm off-white | #F5F0E8 | Good all-round starting point; similar to cream paper |
| Soft yellow | #FFFDE7 | Reduces blue-light stress; good under fluorescent office lights |
| Pale blue | #E8F4F8 | Preferred by some readers with Irlen sensitivity |
| Light grey | #F0F0F0 | Neutral; works well with dark mode monitors |
Note that page colour affects the on-screen view only — when you print, Word still prints on whatever paper is in the tray. If you want to print on tinted paper, that has to be done at the print stage. The background-colours guide at background colours for dyslexia explains the research behind each tint.
Margins and line length
Word's default margins (2.54 cm / 1 inch) produce a line length of roughly 85–90 characters on a standard A4 page with 11pt text. That is too long for comfortable dyslexic reading. The research suggests 60–70 characters per line as a practical maximum — beyond that, the return-sweep at the end of each line becomes error-prone and the reader frequently re-reads the same line or skips one.
Two ways to shorten line length in Word:
- Increase margins. Layout tab → Margins → Custom Margins. Set left and right margins to 3 cm or 4 cm. This narrows the text block without changing font size.
- Use a two-column layout. Layout tab → Columns → Two. This splits the page into narrower columns — useful for landscape documents or wide monitors. Each column is roughly 40–45 characters wide, which is comfortable for most dyslexic readers.
If you regularly read long documents at full screen on a 27-inch monitor, the column approach is especially worth trying. A full-width line at 14pt can run to 120+ characters — roughly double what helps.
Immersive Reader
Immersive Reader is Word's built-in accessibility mode. It is available in Word 365 (both desktop and web) and is one of the most underused features in the whole application. To open it: View tab → Immersive Reader.
Inside Immersive Reader you get:
- Column width — a slider from very narrow to full page. Start at the second or third position from the left.
- Page colour — the same tints described above, accessible without hex codes.
- Text spacing — increases character, word, and line spacing simultaneously with one toggle. This is the single fastest route to a more readable document.
- Syllables — inserts small dots between syllables in every word. Helpful for sounding out unfamiliar words.
- Parts of speech — highlights nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in different colours. Useful for readers who struggle to parse long sentences.
- Read Aloud (see next section).
- Line Focus — greys out all text except the current line (or one, three, or five lines). Reduces distraction and helps readers who lose their place mid-paragraph.
- Picture Dictionary — shows a small illustration for the selected word. Primarily aimed at language learners but occasionally useful for readers who have difficulty visualising abstract nouns.
Most useful combination in Immersive Reader: Column width at 60%, page colour set to warm off-white, Text Spacing on, Line Focus set to three lines. This single setup removes most of the common reading difficulties in one go. You can exit and return to editing without losing your changes — the document is unaffected.
Read Aloud
Read Aloud is Word's text-to-speech feature. It reads the document aloud while simultaneously highlighting each word as it is spoken — a combination that research consistently associates with improved comprehension and error detection in dyslexic readers. Hearing a word while seeing it highlighted gives working memory a second encoding path, which reduces the load on the phonological processing that dyslexia typically makes effortful.
To start Read Aloud: Review tab → Read Aloud (or from inside Immersive Reader). Controls appear in a small floating toolbar:
- Play/Pause — Ctrl+Alt+Space (Windows) / Cmd+Option+Space (macOS)
- Previous / Next sentence — Ctrl+Alt+Left / Right
- Speed — click the settings gear; range is 0.5x to 3x. For dyslexic readers who also struggle with working memory, 0.8x or 1.0x is usually right. Faster speeds outrun the visual highlight and lose the benefit.
- Voice — choose from installed system voices. On Windows 11, the newer "natural" voices (Jenny, Guy, etc.) are significantly clearer than the legacy SAPI voices. On macOS, Siri voices work well.
One practical use: after writing, run Read Aloud on your own text before sending it. Dyslexic writers often transpose letters or drop small words (is, the, of) without noticing visually — the ear catches them immediately. For more on combining voice and text, see dyslexia-friendly text-to-speech in Chrome.
Autocorrect and spell check — tuning them for dyslexic writers
Word's autocorrect is aggressive by default. It capitalises after full stops, corrects common misspellings mid-typing, and replaces certain character sequences with typographic variants. For dyslexic writers this can be disorienting — the word you typed disappears and is replaced by something different mid-keystroke, breaking the typing flow.
To dial this back: File → Options → Proofing → AutoCorrect Options. The most helpful changes:
- Uncheck "Correct two initial capitals" — many dyslexic writers type two capitals by accident because they hold Shift slightly too long. Word's correction of this is often itself wrong.
- Uncheck "Replace text as you type" if autocorrect substitutions interrupt your flow. You can leave spell-check on (red underlines) without having text replaced automatically.
- Under "Proofing → When correcting spelling in Microsoft Office programs," turn on "Check spelling as you type" but turn off "Mark grammar errors as you type" if the green/blue grammar underlines add visual noise without useful signal.
The spell-check dictionary learns from your corrections. If you consistently retype a misspelling the same way, right-click the underline and choose "Add to Dictionary" — after that, Word accepts it silently. This is useful for names, technical terms, and phonetically-spelled words that Word persistently flags.
Saving your settings as the default
The biggest obstacle to better Word settings is having to reapply them every time you open a new document. The fix is to save a modified Normal.dotm — Word's global template that underpins every blank document.
- Open a new blank document and apply all your preferred settings: font, size, line spacing, margins, paragraph spacing.
- Go to Home → Styles → right-click "Normal" → Modify.
- In the Modify Style dialog, make sure "New documents based on this template" is selected at the bottom.
- Click OK. Word updates Normal.dotm silently.
From now on, every new blank document opens with your settings. Existing documents retain their own formatting until you explicitly change it. Page colour and Immersive Reader settings are not saved to the template — you will need to reapply them per document.
Word for the Web
If you use Word through a browser rather than the desktop app, most of the settings above apply but the menus are slightly different. Immersive Reader is available via View → Immersive Reader; Read Aloud is under Review. Font installation is not needed — you set the font in the document and the web version renders it using whatever fonts the browser can access.
One important difference: the web version of Word does not support custom page colours directly. You can add a highlighted background to a text block using the Highlight tool, but there is no page-level colour setting. For reading long documents in a browser with a tinted background, using a browser-level reading tool (or a Chrome extension that overrides page styles) is more practical. LexiFont's font override applies to Word for the Web just as it applies to any other website — if you set Lexend or Atkinson Hyperlegible in LexiFont, those fonts replace the document's fonts in your browser view.
Pairing Word with web reading tools
If you routinely copy text from Word into a browser — to paste into email, Slack, a CMS, or a web app — the formatting you set in Word does not carry over. The browser renders text in its default font.
Installing LexiFont means your preferred dyslexia font follows you everywhere in Chrome: Gmail, Google Docs, Notion, news sites, everything. So the workflow that works well for many dyslexic office users is: set up Word carefully for document editing, and use LexiFont for everything else. The two tools complement each other without any overlap. LexiFont Pro unlocks the full font library — Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, OpenDyslexic, and others — for a one-time fee, so you are never asked to subscribe to keep reading comfortably.
For a parallel guide covering Google's equivalent tool, see dyslexia-friendly Google Docs settings.