Blog · Practical setups
Reading spreadsheets with dyslexia
Most reading advice for dyslexia assumes prose - sentences, paragraphs, a line you follow left to right. A spreadsheet breaks all of that. The text is mostly numbers, the cells are tiny, the rows blur into each other, and a single misread digit can change a total, a date, or an invoice. If you find Google Sheets and Excel disproportionately exhausting, you are not imagining it. A grid of dense figures is close to a worst case for a dyslexic reader, and the default settings make it harder than it needs to be.
The good news: spreadsheets are unusually fixable. Almost every problem below has a setting, and you can change most of them in under a minute. This is a practical setup, in the order that gives you the biggest relief first.
Why a grid is harder than a paragraph
Three things stack up at once in a spreadsheet, and each one taxes a different part of reading.
The content is mostly digits. Numbers carry no context. In prose, if you misread a word your brain usually catches it because the sentence stops making sense. A transposed digit produces a number that is just as plausible as the right one - 1605 instead of 1650 reads fine, and nothing flags the error. This is the same problem we cover in depth in numbers and dyslexia: digits are where a misread does the most damage and gets caught the least.
The grid removes the cues you rely on. Reading a row of a table means tracking horizontally across cells that may be far apart, with no words in between to anchor your eye. Then you have to drop down exactly one row and come back. Losing your place between columns is the table version of the line-tracking problem we describe in why some readers lose their place - except a grid gives you two axes to get lost on instead of one.
The defaults are small and tight. Both Google Sheets and Excel ship with a 10 or 11 point font, narrow row height, and just enough cell padding to read comfortably if you have no reading difficulty at all. For a dyslexic reader that is the wrong starting point on every dimension at once.
Step one: change the font (the single biggest win)
The font matters more in a spreadsheet than in any prose document, because the only thing distinguishing one cell from another is the shape of a few characters. The default in Excel is Aptos (formerly Calibri); in Google Sheets it is Arial. Both are fine general-purpose fonts and both are mediocre at keeping digits unambiguous.
What you want in a spreadsheet font is slightly different from what you want for reading an article. The priority is character distinction - every digit and letter unmistakable from its look-alikes - more than flowing readability. Three qualities matter most:
A large x-height and open apertures, so the gaps in letters like a, e and c stay open and don't fill in at small sizes. This is the property we unpack in x-height and dyslexia, and it is exactly what keeps 6, 8 and 9 from collapsing into each other in a 10 point cell.
A slashed or dotted zero and a single-story a, which together kill the worst homoglyph confusions. And honest, distinct figures - ideally lining figures (all the same height) for columns of numbers, rather than old-style figures that rise and fall.
Good built-in choices, in rough order of preference for a grid: Atkinson Hyperlegible (designed by the Braille Institute specifically to disambiguate look-alike characters - it is the best single choice for numbers, and we cover it in full in Atkinson Hyperlegible in Chrome), then Lexend, then Verdana if you want something that ships everywhere. OpenDyslexic is excellent for prose but its bouncy weighted bottoms make dense numeric columns feel restless, so it is usually not the right pick for a working sheet.
In Google Sheets: select all (Ctrl/Cmd+A), then use the font menu in the toolbar. Atkinson Hyperlegible and Lexend are both in the "More fonts" list - add them once and they stay available. In Excel: select all, then set the font on the Home tab. To make it the default for new workbooks, change it under File → Options → General → "When creating new workbooks". Atkinson Hyperlegible is free to install from Google Fonts if it is not already on your machine.
If you mostly read spreadsheets other people built - dashboards, shared trackers, reports in the browser - you often cannot change their font from inside the document. That is where a browser-level override helps: LexiFont applies a dyslexia-friendly font to web pages including the Google Sheets and Office web apps, so a sheet someone shared with you renders in the font you read best without you touching their formatting.
Step two: make the rows breathe
Tight rows are the second big problem. When rows are short, the figures from the line above and below crowd into your reading band, and that crowding - the visual interference between a target and the things next to it - is something dyslexic readers are measurably more sensitive to. Generous spacing is one of the most reliable interventions there is, which is why we give it its own piece in line spacing and letter spacing for dyslexia.
In a spreadsheet, three adjustments help:
Increase row height. Add roughly 30 to 50 percent above the default. In Google Sheets, select the rows, right-click and use "Resize rows", or set vertical padding under Format → "Alignment". In Excel, drag a row border or set a row height of about 20 to 24 points for an 11 point font. The extra whitespace above and below each line of figures does more for legibility than almost anything else.
Widen the columns a little past what the numbers strictly need, so digits are not jammed against the cell edge or against the next column. Cramped columns force your eye to work at the exact boundary where look-alike digits are hardest to tell apart.
Bump the font size to at least 12, and 13 to 14 if you read numbers a lot. There is no prize for fitting more rows on screen if you have to re-check every one. This lines up with what we found on the best font size for dyslexic adults: the comfortable size for sustained reading is larger than most defaults, and spreadsheets default smaller than prose to begin with.
Step three: use colour to carry the grid, not decoration
A plain grid asks your eye to do all the line-tracking work unaided. A few deliberate colour choices hand some of that work to the page.
Turn on alternating row colours (banding). This is the most effective single anti-tracking tool in a spreadsheet. A faint tint on every other row gives your eye a rail to follow horizontally, so you are far less likely to slip up or down a line mid-row. In Google Sheets it is Format → "Alternating colours"; in Excel, "Format as Table" applies banding automatically. Keep the contrast between bands gentle - you want a hint, not a zebra.
Soften the background. A pure white sheet under a numeric grid can produce glare and the shimmering "rivers" some readers see on bright backgrounds. A muted cream, pale grey or soft blue background takes the edge off without hurting contrast. This is the same reasoning behind background colours for dyslexia - the goal is comfortable contrast, not maximum contrast.
Use colour to group, sparingly. A single accent on a header row or a totals column gives your eye a landmark to navigate back to. Resist the urge to colour-code everything - past two or three meaningful colours, the page becomes noise and the cues stop being cues.
Step four: reduce how much you have to hold in your head
Spreadsheets lean hard on working memory: you read a value in one column, carry it across to compare with another, and hold a running sense of the row you are on. Dyslexia and a stretched working memory often travel together, as we discuss in dyslexia and working memory, so anything that lets the sheet remember things for you is a direct win.
Freeze the header row and the first column (View → Freeze in both apps) so the labels never scroll out of sight. Half the effort of reading a big table is remembering which column you are in; freezing removes it entirely.
Format numbers consistently. Thousands separators, a fixed number of decimal places, and right-aligned figures so the digits line up by place value. A column where 1,200.00 sits directly above 950.00 is far easier to scan than one mixing 1200, 950.5 and 1,200.00. Aligning the decimal points turns "read each number" into "see the shape of the column".
Split dense cells. If a cell crams together a code, a date and a note, your eye has to parse three things with no space between them. Put them in separate columns, or add a space or separator. The fix is the same one that helps everywhere else - give each piece of information room.
Easy: 1,200.00 950.50 1,200.00 88.00
Step five: have the numbers read back to you
For checking work - confirming you typed an invoice total or a long reference correctly - your eyes are the weak link, because a transposed digit looks fine. Hearing the number is a completely independent check. Both apps will read a selected range aloud through your operating system's accessibility tools (VoiceOver on Mac, Narrator on Windows), and Google Sheets supports screen-reader output under Accessibility settings. Reading a column of figures back to yourself, or having them read to you, catches the silent errors that visual proofreading misses. If you lean on audio for longer text too, our guide to text-to-speech in Chrome covers the browser side.
A sensible default setup
If you want a starting point to adjust from, this works well for most people:
Atkinson Hyperlegible at 13 point. Row height around 1.4 times the default. Columns a touch wider than the numbers need. Alternating row colours on, with a gentle band. A soft off-white or pale grey background instead of pure white. Header row and first column frozen. Numbers right-aligned with thousands separators and a fixed two decimal places. Set that once, save it as your template, and most of the daily friction disappears.
When the spreadsheet isn't yours
Everything above assumes you can edit the file. Often you can't - it's a read-only dashboard, a shared report, or a sheet open in the browser that belongs to someone else. You can still change how it looks to you. A browser font override restyles the page on your screen without altering the underlying document, so a sheet built in cramped Arial can render in Atkinson Hyperlegible or Lexend just for you. LexiFont is a Chrome extension that does exactly this across the web, including the Google Sheets and Office web apps, and the free tier handles the core font swap. If spreadsheets are a daily part of your work and you want the cleaner number-friendly faces, LexiFont Pro adds Atkinson Hyperlegible, Lexend and Comic Neue as a one-time purchase.
The short version
Spreadsheets feel hard because they concentrate every difficulty - context-free digits, two-axis tracking, and cramped defaults - into one grid. But almost all of it is adjustable. Change the font to something that keeps digits distinct, give the rows room to breathe, let banding carry your eye across, freeze the labels so you stop holding them in your head, and read the critical numbers back to catch the silent errors. None of it requires a diagnosis or special software - just settings you change once and keep.