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Reading recipes online with dyslexia — a setup that helps

10 min read · July 25, 2026

Recipe websites are some of the worst-designed pages on the internet for anyone with a reading difficulty. A 300-word recipe is buried under a 2,000-word life story, split across two columns, interrupted by pop-ups, and formatted in a ten-point font with barely any line spacing. For dyslexic readers, that combination doesn't just make cooking frustrating — it makes mistakes likely. Wrong quantities, skipped steps, lost place. This guide covers what specifically makes recipe sites hard, and how to fix it in about five minutes.

Why recipe sites are unusually hard for dyslexic readers

Most content on the web is a single column of text that flows top to bottom. Recipe sites break almost every rule that makes reading manageable.

Two-column layout. The classic recipe layout puts ingredients on the left and method on the right, or stacks them so you have to scroll up to check a quantity midway through a step. Your eye has to jump back and forth across the page while you're also standing at a counter, which is a heavy load even for fluent readers. For dyslexic readers who use more peripheral context to anchor their place on a line, a column boundary is a genuine interruption.

Fractions and units. Recipes are dense with numbers: 3/4 cup, 1½ tsp, 200g, 180°C. Fractions on a screen are often rendered as small superscript-slash-subscript combinations that are visually ambiguous even for people without dyslexia. Numbers in dyslexia are their own category of difficulty — transposing digits or misreading 1/3 as 1/8 is the kind of error that quietly ruins a dish. Our piece on fonts that make digits clearer covers this in more depth.

Numbered steps that look alike. A method section with twelve steps, each beginning "Add…", "Stir…", "Cook…", is a place where it's very easy to lose your position. Once you've looked up to stir something and back down to the screen, re-finding step 7 in a list of twelve is genuinely hard — especially if the font is small and the steps are tightly spaced.

Visually similar words. Recipes are full of pairs that dyslexic readers sometimes confuse: stir / store, flour / flavor, drain / grain, slice / spice, bake / base. The words appear in rapid succession and the context doesn't always disambiguate them before you've already acted.

Ad-choked layouts. Commercial recipe sites survive on advertising, which means the page is designed to maximise time-on-site, not readability. Autoplaying video in a sidebar, a sticky banner at the bottom, and three in-content ads in the method section are standard. Every additional visual element on a page competes for attention — and for readers who already spend extra cognitive effort parsing text, that competition has a real cost.

What the problems actually cost you

This isn't a complaint about inconvenience. The combination of small text, cluttered layout, multi-column structure, and dense numbers means that errors in the kitchen are much more likely. Misreading 1 tsp as 1 tbsp of salt is a ruined dish. Skipping a step in a baking recipe because you lost your place is often unrecoverable. Misreading the temperature by inverting digits — 180°C as 810°C, or more plausibly 160 as 106 — creates a safety issue on a gas hob or oven.

This is the kind of practical reading failure that rarely gets discussed in lists of "signs of dyslexia" but is a consistent report from dyslexic adults who cook. The fix isn't to stop cooking from the web — it's to remove the friction before you start.

Step 1: strip the page with Reader mode

The fastest single change you can make is activating your browser's built-in Reader mode before you start reading a recipe. Reader mode strips out everything except the main content text — no sidebars, no ads, no pop-ups, no autoplaying video. The result is a single-column page with generous margins, a font you can control, and nothing else.

In Chrome: the Reader mode equivalent is "Reading mode" accessible from the side panel icon (the book icon at the top right of the address bar in recent Chrome versions). In Safari: the Reader icon in the address bar. In Firefox: the Reader View icon at the end of the address bar. In Edge: Immersive Reader via F9 or the book icon.

Reader mode won't work on every recipe site — some dynamically load their content in a way that defeats the parser. But on AllRecipes, BBC Good Food, Serious Eats, Simply Recipes, and most others, it works reliably. Our guide to Reader mode vs reading extensions covers the tradeoffs in more detail, including what to do when Reader mode fails to extract the content properly.

Step 2: apply a dyslexia-friendly font

Reader mode gives you a clean layout; a good font makes the text itself easier to parse. The two combine: a clean layout in a poor font still leaves you squinting at dense sans-serif body text at 14px. A good font in a cluttered layout still leaves you visually overwhelmed.

Typical recipe site — small, tight, serif body text Add the flour, baking powder, and salt to a bowl and whisk until combined. In a separate jug, whisk together the eggs, milk, and melted butter. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and fold until just combined — do not overmix. Heat a non-stick pan over medium heat and brush with oil.

Same text — Lexend at 18px with 1.9 line height Add the flour, baking powder, and salt to a bowl and whisk until combined. In a separate jug, whisk together the eggs, milk, and melted butter. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and fold until just combined — do not overmix. Heat a non-stick pan over medium heat and brush with oil.

The difference for a dyslexic reader tracking a multi-step method is not cosmetic. Wider character spacing and taller lowercase letters (high x-height) mean you spend less effort parsing individual words and more attention on the sequence of steps. LexiFont applies your chosen font — Lexend, OpenDyslexic, Atkinson Hyperlegible, or others — to every website in Chrome with one click. It works inside Reader mode on the Chrome side panel, so you can stack both fixes. For a deeper look at which fonts perform best for this kind of connected reading, see our guide to the best fonts for dyslexia in 2026.

Step 3: adjust line spacing and font size

Even with a good font, default line heights on recipe sites tend to be too tight for comfortable tracked reading. When you look up from the pan and look back down, you need to find your place in a numbered list quickly. Generous line spacing — around 1.8 to 2.0 times the font size — creates enough white space between lines that your eye can scan vertically to the right step without jumping to the wrong one.

Font size matters separately. A common mistake is to increase font size alone without touching line height, which makes each line feel more crowded rather than less. The right approach is to increase both together. Most browser Reader modes let you set font size and, in some cases, text spacing. LexiFont's Pro tier also exposes letter-spacing and line-height controls that apply globally across all sites, so you don't have to set them per-site. Our article on line spacing and letter spacing for dyslexia covers the research behind specific values.

Step 4: choose a background colour that reduces glare

Recipe reading often happens in a kitchen — under bright overhead lighting, near a window, or on a screen that hasn't been calibrated for ambient conditions. The high contrast between a pure-white background (#FFFFFF) and black text causes halation for many readers with visual stress, and this is more pronounced in brighter environments.

A cream or warm-grey background reduces this significantly. If your browser Reader mode supports background colour selection, use the warm or sepia setting rather than white or black. If it doesn't, our guide on background colours for dyslexia explains which shades work best and how to apply them across sites. Dark mode for recipe reading is more complicated: it can reduce glare but introduces its own issues with contrast-heavy images and the visual rhythm of cooking steps. See our piece on dyslexia-friendly dark mode for a thorough look at when it helps and when it doesn't.

Step 5: use text-to-speech for the method

For many dyslexic readers, the hardest part of following a recipe isn't reading the ingredients list — it's tracking which step you're on while your hands are occupied. Reading step 6 into your working memory, then executing it, then finding step 7 again when you've already set the phone face-down is where errors happen.

Text-to-speech solves this directly. With the recipe open in Reader mode, you can have Chrome read the method section aloud while you cook. You don't need to look at the screen at all. Chrome has a built-in Read Aloud option (right-click on the selected text and choose "Read Aloud"), and more capable extensions like Natural Reader or Read&Write offer voice controls and speed adjustment. Our guide to dyslexia-friendly text-to-speech in Chrome covers the best options.

A practical workflow: read the ingredients list carefully before you start cooking (this is the most error-prone part, because quantities matter most here), then switch to audio for the method. Pause and resume by voice if your browser extension supports it, or just tap once on the screen.

Step 6: highlight or copy individual steps

If you prefer to keep the recipe visible rather than audio-only, a useful trick is to copy a single step into a separate note and increase the font to something you can see from across a counter — 28 to 36px — before you begin that step. This puts only the step you need in front of you, not the surrounding steps that your eye might accidentally read instead.

This works especially well with a notes app open in a split window on a tablet, or on a second monitor if you have one. For dyslexic readers who use sticky notes in print cooking, this is the digital equivalent: one instruction visible at a time.

Dealing with fractions and measurements

The number-reading issue deserves its own moment. If you regularly misread quantities — transposing digits, confusing 1/3 and 1/4, misreading tablespoon and teaspoon abbreviations — a few habits help beyond font choice.

First, many recipe sites now have a "jump to recipe" button that renders the ingredients in a clean card format with larger text and clear formatting. Use it rather than reading the quantities from the body text. Second, a font with a distinctive one (with a serif or foot, not a plain vertical stroke) and clearly differentiated zero and O helps significantly. Atkinson Hyperlegible was specifically designed for low-vision and ambiguous-character situations, and numbers are a specific design target. Our piece on fonts that make numbers easier to read goes into detail on what to look for. Third, use a unit converter if you're working with a recipe in unfamiliar measurements — converting cups to grams before you start removes an in-the-moment cognitive load.

When to print

There's a case for printing recipes even if you usually read everything on screen. A printed page doesn't autoplay video, doesn't resize if you accidentally touch the screen, doesn't require you to keep the screen unlocked, and can sit flat next to the hob without needing to be propped up. Most modern browsers have a "Print" or "Save as PDF" option that strips ads and reformats the recipe into a clean single column.

If you do print, use a font size of at least 14pt and print the recipe in Reader mode or from the recipe card rather than the full page. Our guide to dyslexia-friendly typefaces for print is worth a look if you're deciding which font to embed when saving to PDF from a browser.

The full setup, condensed

Before you start cooking: open the recipe in Chrome, click the Reader mode icon, set your background to warm/sepia, activate LexiFont with Lexend or Atkinson Hyperlegible at 18px. Read the full ingredients list once carefully before you touch anything. Use the recipe card / jump-to-recipe block for quantities if available.

During cooking: for complex multi-step methods, use Read Aloud (right-click the method section) so you can listen rather than read while your hands are busy. For shorter recipes, copy each step into a note app at large font size and advance step by step.

If you cook the same recipes repeatedly: save the clean Reader mode version as a PDF at your preferred font and size so you never have to fight the site again.

None of this is complicated, but the combination matters. Reader mode alone still leaves you with the default browser font. A good font on a cluttered layout still overwhelms. The point is to strip and then improve — in that order.

If you haven't tried LexiFont yet, the free tier gives you OpenDyslexic and Lexend on any site, including recipe sites, with no configuration. LexiFont Pro adds Atkinson Hyperlegible, Comic Neue, and the spacing controls that let you set line height globally. Either way, it takes about thirty seconds to install and works immediately on whatever page you have open.

Cooking from the web should not require fighting your browser before you can fight a recipe. A few minutes of setup today means you can open any recipe site from now on and actually read it.