Neurodiversity

Dyslexia

Persona: Kwame

Kwame, 17, Ghanaian British, lives with his family in social housing. Preparing to file his first tax return and struggles with dense text-heavy financial forms.

About This Condition

Letter reversal, tracking difficulty, and slow decoding make dense text-heavy interfaces cognitively exhausting. Font choice, line spacing, plain language, and the ability to hear content read aloud reduce the effort required to extract meaning and complete tasks accurately.

Digital Challenges

Justified text, small fonts, dense paragraphs, and interfaces with no text-to-speech support increase reading load significantly. People with dyslexia may misread labels, skip instructions, or avoid text-heavy tasks entirely when design does not account for how they process written language.

Assistive Technologies

  • Text-to-speech
  • screen readers
  • reading ruler browser extensions

Design Considerations

Use left-aligned text with generous line height and letter spacing. Avoid justified text blocks. Support text-to-speech for all content including error messages and form labels. Break instructions into short paragraphs with clear headings.

Clinical Examples

Specific learning disorder with impairment in reading