Blog · Typography

Why Times New Roman is hard for dyslexic readers

9 min read · May 24, 2026

Times New Roman is the default body font for almost every long document you will ever be handed - academic papers, legal contracts, government forms, court filings, university essays, the average Word document opened from a colleague. It is also, quietly, one of the harder typefaces for a dyslexic adult to read. The face was designed in 1931 for the narrow columns of a London broadsheet, optimised for ink-on-newsprint at small sizes, and what made it efficient in that environment is exactly what makes it draining in the reading environments we actually live in now. Here is what specifically goes wrong, and the small set of swaps that fix it on every surface that matters.

What Times New Roman was designed for

Stanley Morison drew Times New Roman for The Times newspaper at a moment when the priority was fitting as many words as possible into a narrow column of grey newsprint without losing legibility at six-point body size. Every design decision in the face serves that brief. The letterforms are narrow, so more words fit per line. The stroke contrast (the difference between thick and thin parts of each letter) is high, so the page looks "dense" and authoritative. The serifs are sharp and bracketed, which sharpens letter recognition under wet ink. The x-height (the height of a lowercase letter relative to its capital) is deliberately small, which leaves room for prominent ascenders and descenders - the strokes on letters like h, k, p, q.

All of these decisions made sense for hot-metal type in a newspaper. None of them are kind to a screen, an A4 page, or a reader with dyslexia.

The four things working against you

If a dyslexic reader opens a 30-page document in Times New Roman 12pt and finds it heavy in a way that the same document in another face is not, four specific design features are doing the damage.

1. The condensed letter widths. Times New Roman is a narrow face, which means letters sit closer together by default than in a typical sans-serif. For a dyslexic reader, the eye relies on word-shape recognition and the white space between letters to chunk a word. Narrower letters with less surrounding white compress that visual signal. Research on letter spacing - we covered this in our piece on line and letter spacing for dyslexia - has repeatedly shown that even small increases in tracking (around 0.05-0.1em) measurably improve reading speed in dyslexic readers. Times New Roman starts from the opposite end of that scale.

2. The high stroke contrast. The thick verticals and razor-thin horizontals that give Times New Roman its "literary" look are exactly the contrast pattern that anti-aliasing engines struggle with at body sizes. The thin parts of letters fall below one pixel on standard displays and either ghost out (rendering pale and partial) or get awkwardly hinted into chunky pseudo-pixels. The brain has to do extra work to interpret a letter whose shape is inconsistently rendered, and that extra work compounds line over line.

3. The mirror-prone letterforms. Dyslexic readers, especially when fatigued, often confuse letters that are rotational or mirror images of each other - b/d, p/q, n/u, h/y. Times New Roman makes the problem worse because its lowercase b, d, p and q are almost perfectly mirror-symmetric to each other, with serifs that follow the same pattern on all four. The face has no asymmetric feature - no weighted bottom, no rounded foot, no varied terminal - that lets the eye disambiguate them at a glance. Compare that to a face like OpenDyslexic, where the same letters are deliberately drawn with a heavier base on each glyph so b and d are visually distinct shapes rather than the same shape flipped.

b, d, p, q in Times New Roman

b d p q

b, d, p, q in Atkinson Hyperlegible

b d p q

4. The small x-height. Times New Roman has a relatively low x-height - lowercase letters are short relative to their capitals. That looks elegant on a printed page but it means body text in Times appears smaller than the same point size in most other faces, and the parts of letters most people read (the middle bodies, not the ascenders) carry less visual weight. To get equivalent perceived size to a face like Atkinson Hyperlegible or Lexend, you need to bump Times New Roman up roughly one or two points. Most defaults do not.

What the research actually says

It is worth being honest here. Reading-with-dyslexia research is a noisy field, with small sample sizes, inconsistent methods, and a lot of strongly held opinions on both sides about whether "dyslexia fonts" actually beat well-chosen mainstream fonts. The evidence base for any specific font being optimal is genuinely thin.

What the evidence is more consistent on is the reverse: certain font properties make reading harder, and Times New Roman happens to combine several of them. Studies of typographic legibility for low-vision and dyslexic readers tend to converge on the same recommendations - higher x-height, more uniform stroke weight, wider letter spacing, more open counters (the white space inside letters like o, e, a). These are descriptions of what to avoid as much as what to seek, and Times New Roman is closer to the avoid list than the seek list on each criterion.

This does not mean Times New Roman is unreadable. It means that if you are dyslexic and you have a choice, you should usually take a different one. For a deeper take on the serif/sans debate that sits underneath this question, see serif vs sans-serif for dyslexic readers.

What to switch to, by surface

The good news: on every surface where you encounter Times New Roman, the swap takes under a minute. Here is the recipe by environment.

In Microsoft Word

Word still defaults documents to Calibri or Aptos in recent versions, but inherited templates - especially academic, legal and corporate ones - frequently revert to Times New Roman. To set a better default:

Open a blank document. Go to Home → font dialog (the small arrow at the bottom-right of the Font panel).
Pick a friendlier face. Verdana, Tahoma and Arial are universally installed and all read better than Times New Roman for dyslexic adults. If you have installed Atkinson Hyperlegible (free from Braille Institute) or Lexend, pick one of those instead.
Set the size to 12pt or 13pt - one notch up from the Times New Roman 11pt you might have inherited.
Click Set As Default and choose "All documents based on the Normal template".

For documents you receive from other people in Times New Roman, hit Ctrl+A to select all then change the font in one move. This is non-destructive: you can always undo, and if you save under a new name the original sender's formatting is preserved on their copy.

In Google Docs

Google Docs defaults to Arial, but again, many shared templates - dissertations, university worksheets, contracts - override to Times New Roman. Same recipe:

Select all text (Ctrl+A or Cmd+A).
From the font dropdown, choose a friendlier face. Arial and Verdana are always there; if you want better, click More fonts at the top of the dropdown and add Atkinson Hyperlegible, Lexend, or Comic Neue.
Bump the size from 11 to 12 or 13.

If you do a lot of work in Docs, our walkthrough of setting up Google Docs for dyslexia covers the line spacing, margin and contrast tweaks that compound with the font choice.

In PDFs

This is the hard one. A PDF is, for typographic purposes, a flat image of a document - you cannot just swap the font the way you can in Word. The font choice was baked in by whoever created the file, and academic papers, court filings and government documents are overwhelmingly Times New Roman.

You have three practical options. First, open the PDF in a reader with strong reflow support (Microsoft Edge's built-in PDF reader, or a dedicated tool like Adobe Acrobat's Liquid Mode) which will sometimes re-render the text in your chosen system font at a larger size. Second, convert the PDF to a Word document using any of the free online converters - the conversion is imperfect, but it gives you editable text you can re-style. Third, run the PDF through a browser-based reading environment so the page is rendered at the size and contrast you prefer. We walk through these options in detail in dyslexia-friendly PDF reading in Chrome.

In the browser

Many websites still serve their body text in Times New Roman or a serif that behaves the same way - Georgia, Cambria, the system "serif" stack. News archives, university faculty pages, scientific journals, government portals. You do not have to negotiate with each site individually.

A browser-level font override changes the rendered font on every page you visit without touching the underlying site. LexiFont is the tool we make for exactly this: install the extension once, pick OpenDyslexic, Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible or any installed font, and every site renders in your face of choice. The Times New Roman becomes Atkinson Hyperlegible in a click, and stays that way for the next site too.

This is the single highest-leverage change for anyone whose daily reading is mostly online. You stop hunting for a per-site setting, because there isn't one for most sites, and you stop relying on reader mode to fix the typography you actually want fixed.

What about "I am required to submit in Times New Roman"?

Academic style guides, court filings and many corporate templates mandate Times New Roman 12pt. If you are the writer and you have dyslexia, you still get to draft in whatever face you like and convert at submission. Write the paper in Atkinson Hyperlegible 14pt, then on the final pass select all and switch to Times New Roman 12pt. The two will produce roughly the same word count and page count - Times is condensed enough that your draft will compress a little - and the difference between "fighting the typography for ten drafts" and "fighting it once for the proofread" is enormous.

For long submissions like a thesis, do the proofread in your friendlier face, then run a final sense-check in the mandated face to catch any line-break weirdness. The intellectual work is done; the typographic conversion is mechanical.

If you still want a serif

Not every dyslexic reader prefers sans-serif - some find serifs help anchor the eye along a line. If you like the texture of a serif but want something less hostile than Times New Roman, three faces are worth a trial:

Georgia. Designed by Matthew Carter in 1996 specifically for on-screen reading. Wider letterforms, higher x-height, lower stroke contrast than Times. Ships on every operating system.

Charter. Originally designed for low-resolution laser printers, which forced exactly the simplifications - sturdy strokes, open counters, unfussy serifs - that read well for dyslexic adults. Now freely available.

Lexie Readable. A humanist serif drawn specifically with dyslexic readers in mind, used in some UK school materials. Smaller-scale availability but worth installing if you read long-form serif content daily.

Any of the three is meaningfully better than Times New Roman for a dyslexic reader who wants to keep the serif look. For why a serif might still be the right choice for some readers despite the dominant "sans-serif for dyslexia" advice, our piece on serif vs sans-serif for dyslexic readers lays out the trade-offs.

The 90-second fix

If you take one action after reading this:

Open Word or Google Docs.
Set the default font to Verdana, Arial, or - if installed - Atkinson Hyperlegible.
Set the default size to 12 or 13pt.
Save as default.

From that point, every document you create starts in a face that is not fighting you. For the documents other people send you in Times New Roman, you have Ctrl+A and the font dropdown. For PDFs and the web, you have the tools above. The Times New Roman default is a 1931 decision made for a 1931 problem, and you are not obliged to live inside it.