Blog · Workplace tools
Reading Jira and Confluence with dyslexia
Jira and Confluence sit at the centre of most software teams' workflows. For the majority of users they're just a bit cluttered. For dyslexic readers they can feel like wading through concrete — dense blocks of small text, inconsistent spacing, nested comment threads that scatter across the screen, and wiki pages that sprawl without obvious structure. This guide covers what makes these interfaces hard, what you can actually change, and how to build a setup that lets you keep up with your team without fighting the interface every time you open a ticket.
Why Jira and Confluence are particularly hard with dyslexia
The default Jira interface packs a great deal of information into a small space. Ticket descriptions, comments, labels, assignees, status fields, linked issues, and change logs all compete for attention on the same screen. For dyslexic readers — whose brains already work harder to decode individual words — the visual noise of Jira's layout adds significant cognitive load before a single word is processed.
Confluence presents a different problem. Wiki pages can run to thousands of words with few visual breaks. Authors vary wildly in how they structure content; some use clear headings, many do not. Pages inherit Confluence's default typography, which renders body text at a relatively small size (around 14px) in a sans-serif face at line heights tighter than the research on dyslexia-friendly spacing recommends.
Both tools rely heavily on small, dense text in sidebar panels and dropdowns. And because they are web apps, the default fonts are whatever Atlassian's stylesheet specifies — not the one that works best for you.
The fonts Atlassian chose — and why they're not ideal
Jira and Confluence use Atlassian's own design system, which resolves to system sans-serifs in practice: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", and equivalents depending on your operating system. These are clean, modern fonts — but none was designed with dyslexia specifically in mind.
They are also rendered at sizes and weights that prioritise compactness over readability. Comment threads in Jira often appear at 13-14px with line heights that leave little breathing room between lines — a combination that makes tracking across a line and finding your place at the start of the next one noticeably harder for many dyslexic readers.
There is no built-in option in Jira or Confluence Cloud to change the body font across the entire interface. You can increase your browser's minimum font size (which helps a little) but you cannot swap to OpenDyslexic, Lexend, or Atkinson Hyperlegible from within the app itself.
Overriding fonts with a browser extension
The most effective fix is to use a browser extension that overrides the site's CSS. LexiFont does exactly this — it applies your chosen font to all text on any page, including Jira tickets, Confluence pages, and the sidebar navigation of both tools.
Setting it up takes about a minute: install LexiFont from the Chrome Web Store, choose your preferred font, and open a Jira ticket. The extension injects a stylesheet that replaces the site's font stack with yours, across every Atlassian domain you visit.
Lexend tends to work particularly well for Jira's dense ticket interfaces. Its wider letter spacing reduces the crowding effect that compact text creates, making it easier to distinguish individual words in long descriptions.
Atkinson Hyperlegible is a strong choice if letter confusion (b/d, p/q) is part of your dyslexia profile — it was designed specifically to maximise the distinctiveness of each letterform.
OpenDyslexic works well for some readers, particularly those who find that letters feel like they rotate or swap. If it has helped you elsewhere, try it in Confluence's longer prose pages.
You can also configure LexiFont to increase font size globally, which directly addresses Confluence's small body text. Most readers find a base size of 16-17px noticeably more comfortable than Confluence's default.
Spacing: browser zoom and line height
Beyond the font itself, two settings make a meaningful difference to readability in Atlassian tools.
Browser zoom. Chrome's built-in zoom (Cmd/Ctrl + Plus) scales everything on the page — font size, padding, and button size — uniformly. For Jira, zooming to 110-120% is usually enough to make sidebar text comfortable without breaking the layout. Zoom settings are saved per domain, so once you have set it for jira.com and confluence.com it will apply every time you open the tab.
Line height. Neither Jira nor Confluence offer a line-height control, but a custom user stylesheet (via a browser extension such as Stylus) can add one. A line-height: 1.7 rule on p, li, td elements turns dense Confluence prose into something considerably more readable. A line height between 1.5 and 1.8 falls within the range that research on dyslexia-friendly spacing consistently recommends.
Workflow habits that reduce reading load
Typography fixes help, but some of Jira's complexity is structural. A few workflow habits reduce the raw volume of reading you need to do to stay on top of a project.
Filter ticket activity. Jira lets you filter the activity panel to show only Comments, only History, or both. When you need the discussion thread and nothing else, filtering out status changes and field edits can halve the visible text in the activity panel.
Use "Oldest first" or "Newest first" deliberately. Setting comments to newest-first puts the most recent activity at the top, so you spend fewer eyeline jumps scanning down a long thread to find where you left off.
Use the keyboard shortcut to isolate the description. In a Jira ticket, pressing E opens the description in edit mode, which strips away some surrounding sidebar noise. Press Esc to exit without saving. The goal is a slightly cleaner reading surface when the full ticket layout feels overwhelming.
Copy complex descriptions to a plain environment. For long ticket descriptions or Confluence pages that you need to study carefully, pasting the text into a Google Doc gives you full control over font, size, and spacing. Some readers find this interrupts flow; others prefer it for anything requiring careful comprehension rather than a quick scan.
Request accessible formatting from your team. Most teams will adopt simple conventions once they understand the impact: clear H2 headings at the start of ticket descriptions, short paragraphs, avoiding all-caps labels in body text, and using numbered steps rather than dense prose for instructions. Raising dyslexia accommodations at work covers how to open that conversation without making it more complicated than it needs to be.
Working through Confluence pages
Confluence presents a specific set of challenges beyond what Jira imposes. Pages are often written by many different authors with different formatting habits, and the Confluence editor makes it easy to produce long walls of text with no structural breaks.
Use the table of contents. Many Confluence pages include a Table of Contents macro that lists the page's heading structure. If one is present, scan it before reading the page — it tells you which sections are relevant before you commit to reading the whole thing. If there is no TOC, you can install a browser extension that auto-generates one from the heading tags on any page.
Presentation mode. Confluence Cloud has a presentation mode (the lightning bolt icon in the top bar on some page types) that removes the sidebar and renders the page content full-width at a slightly larger size. It is not a true reading mode, but it reduces visual clutter on longer pages.
Dark mode. Jira and Confluence Cloud both offer a dark theme under Settings - Theme. For readers who experience visual stress or glare sensitivity, dark mode can significantly reduce eye fatigue during long reading sessions. It works site-wide and persists across sessions, so you only need to set it once.
Note that dark mode and font overrides from LexiFont generally work alongside each other without conflict. If text contrast looks off after enabling both, toggling one at a time will show you which setting is causing the issue.
Reading dense comment threads
Jira's comment threads compound the reading challenge: quoted text, @mentions, inline code snippets, status changes, and emoji reactions are all rendered at similar visual weight. A few adjustments help.
First, as noted above, use the Comments-only filter to remove activity noise. Second, look for the thread structure itself — Jira's threaded replies are indented, but the indentation is subtle; if you are losing track of which comment is replying to which, try increasing browser zoom to make the indentation more visually distinct.
Third, if a thread has grown very long and the relevant decision or action item is buried somewhere in it, use your browser's find function (Cmd/Ctrl + F) to search for a keyword related to the decision. This is faster than scrolling the thread line by line and reduces the amount of text you need to visually process to find what you are looking for.
LexiFont Pro: per-site font profiles
LexiFont Pro adds per-site font profiles, which means you can configure a different font for Jira and a different one for Confluence without affecting your settings elsewhere. If you spend a significant part of your working day in Atlassian tools, having dedicated profiles for them is worth setting up — it lets you optimise each interface separately rather than compromising on a single global setting.
The free tier applies a single font globally, which works well if you want a consistent reading experience across GitHub, Slack, Stack Overflow, and Jira simultaneously. Most readers find one font that suits their whole development toolchain, and the global setting covers them completely.
A practical starting point: install LexiFont, set Lexend as your global font, zoom Jira and Confluence to 115%, and read three or four tickets and a medium-length Confluence page. Give yourself a full working day at those settings. Most dyslexic readers notice a meaningful difference within an hour — not because the tools become good, but because the cognitive overhead of decoding text goes down enough to let you focus on the content.
Further reading
If you work in a development or technical team, these related guides cover the other tools you likely have open in the same browser session:
- Reading GitHub with dyslexia — pull requests, README files, and issue threads
- Reading Notion with dyslexia — the other major wiki and doc tool in many tech teams
- VS Code settings for dyslexia — your editor, not just the browser
- Reading Slack with dyslexia — messages, threads, and channel announcements