Blog · Workplace

Reading Zoom captions and chat with dyslexia

10 min read · August 28, 2026

Zoom is everywhere. Team stand-ups, client calls, webinars, university lectures — if you work, study, or socialise online, you almost certainly spend time in Zoom. For most people it is a mild convenience. For dyslexic readers it can be exhausting: live captions scroll past before you have finished reading them, the chat pane uses a small, crowded font, shared screens arrive in whatever typeface the presenter chose, and the transcript you get afterwards is a dense wall of un-punctuated text. None of this is inevitable. Most of it is fixable in under five minutes if you know where to look.

Why Zoom is particularly hard for dyslexic readers

Reading on a screen while simultaneously listening to speech, watching a video feed, and occasionally typing a reply is a lot to manage for any reader. For someone with dyslexia, two things make it significantly harder.

First, dyslexic readers typically process written text more slowly than non-dyslexic readers. Live captions are timed to speech, not to reading speed — they appear and disappear on someone else's schedule. A caption that a fluent reader can absorb in two seconds may take a dyslexic reader three or four, and by then the next caption has already replaced it.

Second, the font and layout choices in Zoom's default interface are not designed with dyslexia in mind. The caption text is small, centred, and displayed in a thin sans-serif against a semi-transparent dark background. The chat pane uses a compact font at around 13–14px with tight line spacing. Neither of these is the worst possible presentation for a dyslexic reader, but neither is remotely optimal.

The good news: Zoom has added meaningful accessibility settings over the last few years, and the desktop app in particular gives you quite a bit of control. This guide works through each problem — captions, chat, shared screens, transcripts — and tells you exactly what to change.

Step 1: Make live captions usable

Zoom's live captions (also called "live transcription") are generated automatically using speech recognition. The quality has improved substantially since 2022 and is now reliable enough to be genuinely useful for most calls.

By default, captions appear as a narrow strip at the bottom of your screen in a modest font size. The first thing to do is make them bigger and easier to read.

In the Zoom desktop app, go to Settings > Accessibility. You will find a slider labelled "Closed Caption Font Size." Drag it up. For most dyslexic readers, a size of 120–150% is a good starting point — large enough to read without squinting, small enough that the captions don't cover the video thumbnails you want to watch.

You can also pop the captions out into a separate floating window. Click the up-arrow next to "CC" in the bottom toolbar during a call, then choose "View Full Transcript." This opens a sidebar that shows the full rolling transcript of the call, not just the last two lines. The sidebar is slower to read than the caption strip, but it gives you a buffer — you can glance back two or three sentences if you miss something, rather than losing it forever.

One limitation worth knowing: Zoom's caption font itself cannot currently be changed in the desktop app. You are stuck with the default sans-serif. If you use Zoom in a browser (at web.zoom.us or via the web client), you have more options — more on that below.

Step 2: Fix the chat pane

The in-call chat pane is where participants type questions, share links, and respond to polls. It is also one of the harder reading surfaces in Zoom because the font is small and the messages arrive in a time-pressured stream.

Zoom's Settings > Accessibility also has a "Chat Font Size" option. This is a separate slider from the captions slider, and it is often overlooked. Increase it to at least 120%. If you are on a large monitor, 140% keeps the text readable without making the chat pane feel like a mobile app designed for a toddler.

Beyond font size, the chat pane benefits from the same habits that help with reading Slack with dyslexia or reading Microsoft Teams with dyslexia: ask people to keep messages short, use line breaks between distinct points, and avoid sending four separate one-sentence messages when one paragraph would do. As a host or regular participant, you can model this yourself — it benefits everyone, not just dyslexic readers.

If you are attending a webinar where the chat is a firehose of hundreds of messages, the honest answer is: don't try to read all of it in real time. Open the chat panel, scan for your own name or any direct questions, and accept that the rest is ambient noise. You can download the chat transcript after the call ends (the host can save it, or you can save your own copy) and read it properly, at your own pace, with a font and background you control.

Step 3: Shared screens

When someone shares their screen during a call, you are reading whatever is on their screen — a presentation, a document, a spreadsheet, a code editor. You have no control over the font, size, or colour scheme they have chosen. This is the most frustrating Zoom reading problem, and the one with the fewest good solutions.

A few things help at the margins:

Ask for a copy before the call. If the presenter is sharing slides or a document, ask them to send the file (or a shared link) before the meeting. You can then open it on your own machine, in your own browser or document app, with your preferred settings applied — dyslexia-friendly Google Docs settings, OpenDyslexic via LexiFont, whatever works for you. You do not have to read the shared screen at all; you are following along on your own copy.

Zoom in on the shared screen. During screen sharing, hold Ctrl (or Cmd on Mac) and scroll up to zoom into the Zoom window itself. This is system-level zoom, not Zoom's own zoom — it makes the entire call window larger, including the shared screen content. It is clumsy but effective for short bursts where you need to read something specific.

Ask the presenter to increase their font size. This is a completely reasonable accessibility request, and "could you increase the font size on the slides" is something most presenters are happy to do. If you find it awkward to ask mid-call, mention it before the call starts or frame it as a general "I'm on a small screen today" excuse — most people don't need to know why.

Step 4: Use Zoom in the browser when you can

The Zoom desktop app gives you the most feature access and the best audio/video performance. But for reading purposes, the web client at web.zoom.us has one significant advantage: you can apply browser-level font overrides with a tool like LexiFont.

LexiFont replaces the font on any website in Chrome — including Zoom's web client. If you open Zoom in Chrome and install LexiFont, you can set the chat pane and any on-screen text to OpenDyslexic, Lexend, or Atkinson Hyperlegible. The captions themselves are rendered in a canvas layer that font overrides cannot reach, but the chat text, the participant names, the meeting title, the settings menus — all of that becomes readable in your preferred typeface.

The trade-off is that the web client occasionally lacks features available in the desktop app (breakout rooms, some host controls, virtual background options on older hardware). For attending calls where you are not the host, the web client is usually perfectly adequate and gives you more reading control.

For a broader approach to managing web-based reading tools, see our guide on reader mode vs reading extensions for dyslexia.

Step 5: Work with transcripts after the call

One of the most underused Zoom features for dyslexic readers is the saved transcript. If the host enables cloud recording and transcription, Zoom generates a text file of everything said during the call. This is far more useful than trying to read live captions in real time, because you can read it on your own schedule, at your own pace, in your own environment.

Request transcripts proactively. If you are joining a recurring meeting, ask the host (or your manager) to enable cloud recording with transcription for every session. Frame it as a general team benefit — "transcripts help everyone catch things they missed" — because that is true.

When you receive a transcript, open it in a tool where you have full reading control. If it is a plain text or Word file, open it in your preferred app with your preferred font. If it is a PDF, read our guide on dyslexia-friendly PDF reading in Chrome. If it arrives as a link to Zoom's web portal, open the page in Chrome with LexiFont active.

Zoom transcripts have one consistent flaw: they lack punctuation in many places, rendering a five-minute discussion as a single run-on paragraph. This makes them harder to skim than a properly formatted document. If this is a regular problem for your team, a quick fix is to paste the raw transcript into a large language model with the instruction "add paragraph breaks and punctuation to this meeting transcript" — the result is usually much more scannable. This is a tool for improving readability, not for editing what was said, so use your own judgement about what is appropriate in your workplace.

Step 6: OS-level text scaling as a backstop

If Zoom's own settings don't go far enough, your operating system's text scaling setting is a blunt but reliable backstop. On Windows, go to Settings > Accessibility > Text size and increase the slider. On macOS, go to System Settings > Accessibility > Display and increase "Display" scaling or font smoothing. This affects every app on your system, including Zoom, and can make a real difference to small-text readability even when the app itself doesn't offer a font-size control.

The downside is obvious: scaling everything up can break layouts in apps that weren't designed for it. 110–120% is usually safe for most software. Above 125% you will start to see clipping and overlap in some interfaces.

For a complete guide to setting up your computer for dyslexia-friendly reading across all apps, see our posts on dyslexia-friendly Mac setup and dyslexia-friendly Windows setup.

Before the call: the reading preparation habit

The single most effective dyslexia accommodation for video calls has nothing to do with Zoom settings. It is reading the agenda and any shared documents before the call starts.

Reading at your own pace, in your own environment, with your preferred font and background colour, is always easier than reading on someone else's screen under time pressure. If you know what the call is about and you have already processed the key information, you can spend the call listening and contributing — rather than frantically trying to read a slide you have never seen before while someone talks over it.

Make it a habit to ask for agendas and materials at least 30 minutes before a call. For recurring meetings, ask for a standing document or shared folder where materials are posted in advance. If you have dyslexia and this kind of preparation time is genuinely important to your participation, it is a reasonable workplace accommodation to formalise — see our article on dyslexia workplace accommodations for how to approach that conversation.

A note on Google Meet, Teams, and other platforms

This guide focuses on Zoom because it is the most widely used video call platform, but most of the principles apply elsewhere. Google Meet has its own caption settings (and is browser-only, so LexiFont applies across all its text). Microsoft Teams has caption and transcript features similar to Zoom's, plus tight integration with Microsoft's Immersive Reader for meeting notes. The font-override approach via Chrome works for any browser-based meeting platform.

If you primarily use Meet or Teams, apply the same checklist: increase caption size, increase chat font size, request transcripts, open shared documents on your own machine before the call when possible.

What LexiFont helps with — and what it doesn't

To be direct about this: LexiFont helps with the text in Zoom's web client and anywhere else in Chrome. It cannot override fonts inside the Zoom desktop app (which is a native application, not a browser tab), and it cannot change the font of live captions, which are rendered in a composited video layer rather than as HTML text.

What it can do is make the rest of your browser-based reading — the transcript page, the shared Google Doc, the pre-meeting agenda email in Gmail — readable in OpenDyslexic, Lexend, or Atkinson Hyperlegible. If you spend time before and after calls reading related documents in Chrome, that is where the LexiFont Pro font library earns its place in the workflow.

The free tier applies your chosen font to every website. Pro adds the full library (six fonts including OpenDyslexic, Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, Comic Neue, Dyslexie, and Sylexiad), per-site overrides, and spacing controls — useful if you want one font for Gmail and a different one for reading dense documentation.

Further reading

• Reading Microsoft Teams with dyslexia — a practical setup guide
• Reading Slack with dyslexia — font and layout fixes
• Dyslexia-friendly PDF reading in Chrome
• Dyslexia workplace accommodations — what to ask for and how
• How to read long articles with dyslexia — a practical workflow