Blog · Practical guides
Reading job postings with dyslexia: tools and settings that help
Job hunting is exhausting for anyone. When you have dyslexia, it adds a layer of friction that most advice completely ignores: before you can even decide whether to apply for a role, you have to fight your way through a wall of dense, inconsistently formatted text, often written by someone who had no idea dyslexic people would be reading it. This guide is about reducing that friction so your energy goes into the application itself, not the decoding.
Why job postings are especially hard to read with dyslexia
Job postings are not written for readability. They're usually drafted by HR teams or hiring managers in a hurry, pasted from older postings, reformatted by whatever ATS (applicant tracking system) the company uses, and then rendered on a job board that may have its own stylesheet overriding whatever formatting was there. The result is usually one of two things: a dense wall of text with very few visual breaks, or an endless cascading list of bullet points that somehow manages to feel just as overwhelming.
Several specific features of job postings are particularly hard for dyslexic readers. Jargon and acronyms (SLA, OKR, HRIS, P&L) disrupt the rhythm of reading because they can't be decoded phonologically the way ordinary words can. Requirements sections tend to use passive constructions and nominalisations (“demonstrated ability to leverage cross-functional stakeholder engagement”) that carry high memory load. And the pressure of the context itself doesn't help: reading something with consequences — this might determine whether you get a job — occupies some of the same working-memory resources you need for reading. See our piece on dyslexia and working memory for why this matters so much.
The good news is that most of these problems have practical solutions that take under two minutes to set up.
Step 1: change the font before you read anything
The single highest-leverage thing you can do is override the font the job board is using. Most job boards (LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, company career pages) use default system fonts or generic sans-serifs at whatever size fits their layout, which is often too small and too tightly spaced for comfortable reading. None of that is fixed in the site's code — you can override it.
LexiFont is a Chrome extension that lets you apply any dyslexia-friendly typeface to every website with a single click. The free tier gives you OpenDyslexic. LexiFont Pro adds Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, and Comic Neue — Lexend in particular is useful for job postings because it was designed specifically to reduce the cognitive effort of decoding, which is exactly what dense HR prose demands. You can also adjust font size and line spacing to whatever your eyes prefer.
The setup is the same as for any other website. For a full walkthrough, see our guide on how to change the font on any website in Chrome. Once you've set your preferred font, it applies automatically every time you visit that job board. You don't have to think about it again.
Step 2: strip the page with reader mode
Even with a better font, job board pages are visually noisy. There are sidebars, banner ads, “similar roles” carousels, sticky headers, and modal dialogs asking you to log in. All of that competes for attention that your brain needs for the actual text.
Reader mode eliminates the surrounding clutter and presents the text on a clean, low-contrast background. In Chrome, click the reader-mode icon in the address bar (it appears automatically on article-style pages). In Firefox, the same icon appears as a small book in the address bar. Both versions then let you adjust font, size, and background colour directly within the mode.
One limitation: reader mode doesn't always extract the full posting text cleanly, especially on postings that load their content dynamically (as many ATS-powered career pages do). If the extracted text is incomplete, try the font-override approach in Step 1 instead, or use the copy-paste workflow below. For a fuller comparison of reader mode against extension-based approaches, see reader mode vs reading extensions for dyslexia.
Step 3: get the size and spacing right
Font choice gets most of the attention, but for many dyslexic readers, size and spacing matter just as much. A well-spaced posting in Arial at 18px will often read better than OpenDyslexic at 13px with tight line height. The general guidance:
- Font size: 16–18px is a reasonable starting point for screen reading. If you're still squinting or re-reading sentences, go up. Our guide on best font size for dyslexic adults has more detail.
- Line height: aim for 1.5–1.7. Anything below 1.4 tends to cause the eye to slip between lines on long paragraphs.
- Line length: job board columns are often too wide. If you can, narrow the browser window or use a narrower reading column so each line holds around 60–75 characters.
Chrome's built-in zoom (Cmd/Ctrl + plus key) increases everything on the page proportionally. It's a quick fix when you don't want to open an extension.
Step 4: use text-to-speech for the dense sections
Not every part of a job posting deserves the same reading depth. The first paragraph (what the company does, what the role is) is worth reading carefully. The “requirements” and “responsibilities” sections are where most of the cognitive load sits, and they're exactly the sections where text-to-speech gives you the most relief.
Select the requirements section, right-click, and use Chrome's built-in “Read aloud” option (or the equivalent in your screen reader). Listening to requirements while reading along reduces the decoding load: your eyes track what your ears are already predicting. This is one of the patterns documented in our piece on text-to-speech vs font changes for dyslexia — the two approaches are often more useful in combination than either one alone.
A useful habit: listen to the “nice to have” requirements at 1.2x speed. The items there are often the same boilerplate recycled from the previous posting and rarely determine whether you get screened in. Spending the same reading time on “must have” and “preferred” differently is a small time investment that pays off when you're reviewing ten postings in a session.
Step 5: paste into Google Docs for deep reading
When a job posting genuinely matters — a role you want to apply for — it's worth doing your thorough read in a controlled environment rather than on the job board. Copy the full text of the posting, open a new Google Doc, and paste it there. Then apply your own formatting: your preferred font (Google Docs has a wide selection), your preferred line spacing, and whatever background colour your eyes prefer.
Google Docs also lets you use the built-in voice typing or dictation tools if you want to draft notes alongside the posting. And if you use the Docs accessibility features, you can have the text read aloud while the cursor tracks the current word — a significantly more controlled reading experience than on most job boards. Our guide on dyslexia-friendly Google Docs setup covers the full configuration.
Step 6: use AI to pre-digest the posting
Dense job postings often contain the same information stated three different ways, requirements buried inside responsibilities, and vague phrases (“passionate team player with a bias for action”) that carry essentially no information. Asking an AI assistant to summarise a posting into plain language takes about thirty seconds and can make the difference between a confident read and a fatiguing one.
A practical prompt that works well: “Please summarise this job posting in plain language. List the three most important requirements, what the day-to-day work looks like, and what kind of company this seems to be. Keep it under 150 words.” Paste the posting text after the prompt. The output gives you a scaffold you can then verify against the original, which is much faster than doing a cold read of 600 words of HR prose.
This doesn't replace reading the posting — you'll want to read the actual requirements before applying — but it gives your working memory a frame to hang the details on, which substantially reduces the decoding effort when you go back to the original text.
Step 7: manage your reading sessions
Job hunting at volume — reviewing fifteen postings in an afternoon — is a recipe for reading fatigue even without dyslexia. With it, fatigue accumulates faster and affects accuracy more severely: you're more likely to misread a requirement, miss a key qualification, or apply for a role that doesn't fit because you read the posting in your sixth hour of searching.
Some practical limits that experienced dyslexic job seekers report as useful:
- Review no more than five postings before taking a break of at least ten minutes.
- Do your careful deep-reads (the postings you're actually considering applying to) in the first half of a session, not after an hour of initial screening.
- Keep a simple note document open alongside your job search and paste in the title, company, and one-line summary of each posting as you go. Your future self, returning to shortlist tomorrow, will read that note far faster than re-opening twelve browser tabs.
The strategies for managing reading fatigue generally overlap significantly with ADHD management techniques, since attention and reading load interact in similar ways. See our guide on reading tools for ADHD for approaches that apply to sustained reading sessions of any kind.
After the posting: reading the application itself
Once you've decided to apply, the next reading challenge is the application form itself: text fields, dropdowns, conditional questions, and sometimes a cover letter editor with its own idiosyncratic interface. If you're applying through a company career portal, the formatting there is often worse than on the original job board.
The same font-override approach from Step 1 applies to most career portals: LexiFont works on any website, including Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, and AshbyHQ. If you're writing a cover letter in a portal's own text editor, consider drafting it in Google Docs first (with your dyslexia-friendly formatting), then copy-pasting the finished text in. That way you're composing in a comfortable environment and only doing a final paste into the constrained one.
For handling the email threads that follow an application, our guide on dyslexia-friendly Gmail setup walks through the font and display settings that make professional email easier to process.
A note on disclosing dyslexia
Whether to disclose dyslexia during a job application is a personal decision that depends heavily on the role, the company, and your own experience. This guide doesn't advocate one way or the other. What's worth knowing is that in the UK, US, and EU, dyslexia is recognised as a disability under employment law, and most employers are legally required to make reasonable adjustments for application and interview processes. If you want to request a longer time allowance for a written test or a different format for assessment materials, you can do so without disclosing your full diagnostic history.
The practical upshot: you don't have to white-knuckle your way through an inaccessible application process. Asking for an accessible format is a reasonable adjustment, not a red flag.