Blog · Reading the web with dyslexia
Reading Substack with dyslexia
Substack quietly became one of the longest-form reading surfaces on the web. A typical essay runs three to six thousand words; a long one runs ten. The platform's typography is more thoughtful than most - large body text, generous line height, a clean serif by default - but "thoughtful for the average reader" is not the same as "comfortable if you are dyslexic." A few specific tweaks turn Substack from a tab you bounce off into something you can read for an hour without your eye losing its place.
The short answer
Read posts in the browser, not the app. Swap the default serif for a dyslexia-friendly font with a font-override extension. Pull the column width in to about 60 characters per line. Turn on dark mode if light bothers you. Use the Inbox view - not the email - as your main entry point, so you choose what you read instead of being chased by notifications. Reserve the email itself for posts you already know you want to keep.
The rest of this guide unpacks each of those, plus a few subtler tweaks specific to Substack's quirks: the footnote pattern, the chat tab, the comment thread, the way Substack handles podcasts inside written posts, and how to keep the inbox honest as the number of newsletters you have subscribed to creeps past twenty.
Why Substack is harder than it looks
Substack feels readable on the surface. The default font (a serif called Spectral, with a sans fallback) is set at a generous 19px with line-height around 1.6 - both numbers most blogs would envy. So what's the problem?
Three things, in roughly this order of impact.
One, length without structure. The platform encourages essay form, which means fewer headings and fewer breaks than a typical news article. A six-thousand-word piece is often four to six section headings and a wall of prose between each. If you lose your place mid-section, there is nothing local to grab onto. We've written separately about why dyslexic readers lose their place more often, and on Substack the cost of that single eye jump is unusually high.
Two, the serif is fine for most readers and worse for some. Spectral is a well-designed contemporary serif, but serifs ask a particular kind of letter-shape work from the eye. Some dyslexic readers do fine with serifs; many find sans-serifs visibly easier, and a smaller group needs a weighted-bottom font to stop letter flips. The Substack default is one choice, and it is not your choice. See our piece on serif vs sans-serif for dyslexic readers for the underlying tradeoff.
Three, the inbox is a feed. Substack's inbox view groups every newsletter you subscribe to into a single chronological stream, and that stream is the platform's primary surface. Once you have more than five or six active subscriptions, the feed becomes a firehose, and a dyslexic reader paying the per-word cost on every preview spends more energy choosing what to read than reading.
The setup, step by step
1. Read on the web, not in the app
Substack has mobile apps that look polished, but they are a sealed reading surface - you cannot override the font, you cannot easily change the column width, and the typography choices are non-negotiable. The browser version of substack.com is the opposite: every dyslexia accommodation worth making lives in the browser, behind an extension or a setting.
On desktop, read in Chrome (or any Chromium-based browser - Edge, Brave, Arc). On mobile, you can use mobile Chrome with extension support on Android, or the iOS Safari Reader View as a fallback; iOS does not yet let you load arbitrary font-override extensions in the way desktop does.
2. Swap the font with an override extension
This is the single biggest move. Substack does not let you change the font from inside the site. A browser extension that overrides the font on every page does it for you, in one click, on every Substack essay you ever open, including ones inside paid newsletters.
The font you swap to is personal. The candidates worth trying first:
If your dyslexia involves letter flips (b/d, p/q, m/w), start with OpenDyslexic. Its weighted bottoms anchor letters in space and the difference is usually noticeable in the first paragraph.
If your issue is more visual fatigue than letter confusion, try Lexend. It widens horizontal spacing slightly and the open letter forms reduce the crowding effect that makes long passages feel dense.
If you want a calm, professional sans-serif that you can keep set as your default for months, Atkinson Hyperlegible is the safe choice - it was designed for low-vision readability but its character differentiation helps dyslexic readers too.
The platform's typography is more thoughtful than most - large body text, generous line height, a clean serif by default. None of that helps if the letter shapes themselves are part of your problem.
The platform's typography is more thoughtful than most - large body text, generous line height, a clean serif by default. None of that helps if the letter shapes themselves are part of your problem.
LexiFont applies any of these fonts to Substack (and every other site) with one toggle. The free tier ships OpenDyslexic; LexiFont Pro adds Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible and Comic Neue for a one-time fee.
3. Narrow the column to about 60 characters per line
Substack's default reading column is wider than most reading research recommends. Sixty to seventy-five characters per line is the comfort zone for adult readers; significantly wider, and your eye has to make a longer return sweep at the end of each line, which is the moment dyslexic readers most often lose their place.
Two ways to narrow it:
The lazy way - shrink the browser window. On a 27-inch monitor at 100% zoom, a Substack column at full width is comfortably over 90 characters. Drag the window in until lines are visibly shorter; you usually want the window at about two-thirds of the screen.
The better way - use the browser's Reader Mode (Cmd-Shift-R in Safari, the open-book icon in the Firefox address bar, or a reader extension in Chrome). Reader Mode strips the sidebar, fixes a sensible column width, and lets you set the typeface from the browser's own preferences. The reader-mode workflow plus a font override stacks neatly. See our comparison of reader mode vs reading extensions for the tradeoffs.
4. Dark mode if light hurts; light mode if dark does
Substack respects your operating-system dark-mode setting on most posts. Turn it on at the OS level (System Settings on macOS, the Notifications and Actions area on Windows) and Substack will follow.
The temptation is to assume dark mode is always easier on dyslexic eyes. It is not. Some readers find black text on a cream background calmer than white text on near-black; the cream tone reduces visual stress without the contrast inversion. We unpack the tradeoffs in does dark mode help dyslexia? and the background colour piece. The short version: test both for a week each and pick what holds your attention longer, not what looks nicer in the first thirty seconds.
5. Make the Inbox view your home, not the email
Most Substack readers subscribe by email and end up reading inside Gmail. That is the wrong move for dyslexic readers, for two reasons.
First, the email version applies whatever font your mail client picks. You cannot override it as easily, and on the Gmail web client a browser font extension has to fight the renderer to win. The web version of the post, opened in a fresh tab, is the surface your dyslexia setup actually controls. (For the parallel Gmail setup, see making Gmail easier to read with dyslexia.)
Second, the email arrives whenever the writer publishes - which is to say, at the writer's convenience, not yours. The Substack Inbox view at substack.com/inbox shows the same posts in a feed you can scan when you decide to read. The difference matters: an inbox you visit is a tool; an inbox that visits you is a notification.
Practical move: open Substack's inbox in a tab each morning or evening. Scan, queue what you want to read in actual reading tabs, then close the inbox. Treat the email subscription as a backup index of what was published, not as the reading surface.
6. Tame the footnotes
Substack supports footnotes natively, and many essayists use them liberally. By default a footnote is a small superscript number that, on click, scrolls you to the bottom of the post. The scroll back is the issue - you lose your place in the body text, especially on long posts.
Two adaptations help. One, hover before you click; on desktop, hovering a footnote shows a small preview popup, which is enough to decide whether the footnote is worth the trip. Two, if you do scroll down to read footnotes, use the browser's back-button keyboard shortcut (Alt-Left on Windows, Cmd-Left on Mac) instead of scrolling back manually - it returns the page to exactly where the footnote anchor lives.
7. Skip the comments on first read
This is taste, but worth saying: Substack comment sections at the bottom of long essays add another 2-3,000 words of unstructured text to a post that is already long. If your reading energy is finite (it is), use it on the essay. Read the comments on a second visit, or not at all. The most useful comment threads on Substack are paid-tier discussions, which the writer usually highlights in a separate post anyway.
The mobile workflow
iOS does not let Chrome or Safari load arbitrary content-modifying extensions the way desktop does, so the desktop font-override trick is not available to most iPhone users. Two workarounds that hold up:
One, save long posts to a read-it-later app that does support font overrides. Pocket, Instapaper, Readwise Reader and Matter all let you set a dyslexia-friendly font once and have it apply to every saved Substack essay. The friction is the save step; the reward is that every long post you ever read on the move is in your font, at your width, with your background.
Two, use Safari Reader View (tap the AA icon in the address bar, then the four-line "show reader" icon). Reader View strips the page to text, lets you choose from a small list of system fonts including the dyslexia-leaning San Francisco UI Rounded, and sets a sensible width. It is not as flexible as a font-override extension, but it is one tap and zero subscription. For the broader mobile workflow, see reading on mobile with dyslexia.
The honest verdict on Substack and dyslexia
Substack's defaults are above average for the web - the body size is right, the line height is right, the column is one notch too wide but not absurdly so. If you are a non-dyslexic reader, the platform is a pleasure. If you are a dyslexic reader, the defaults are not pulling against you the way Reddit or LinkedIn defaults do; they are just not actively helping.
The wins are concentrated in two moves: swap the font, narrow the column. Everything else in this guide is a polish on top. If you do nothing else, do those two, in the browser, with a font you have personally tested for ten minutes on something long. The compound effect over a few weeks is real: more essays finished, fewer abandoned mid-scroll, less fatigue at the end of an evening.
And if you find yourself reading more Substack because of it - which is the actual point - you will quickly hit the next bottleneck, which is choosing what to read. That is a different problem. For that, see our workflow for reading long articles with dyslexia.
Get LexiFont Pro - OpenDyslexic, Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible and Comic Neue for $14.99 one-time