Around one in ten people are dyslexic, yet most productivity software is designed as if everyone parses dense walls of text effortlessly. Tiny fonts, cramped line spacing, cluttered screens, and lists that scroll forever — for a dyslexic user, a typical to-do app can demand more effort to read than the tasks take to do.
The One Thing was built by a dyslexic developer for his own use, so this topic is personal to us. Here’s what dyslexia-friendly actually means in software — and what to look for in the tools you rely on daily.
Reading effort is a budget
Dyslexia doesn’t affect intelligence; it affects the cost of decoding text. Every word read costs a bit more effort than it would for a non-dyslexic reader. That cost compounds brutally in productivity apps, because they’re all text — and text you must read repeatedly, all day.
A to-do app that shows 20 tasks makes you pay the decoding cost for 20 items every time you open it, just to find the one you need. Multiply by every glance, every day. The reading budget runs out before the work does.
So the single most dyslexia-friendly design decision isn’t a font. It’s showing less text.
What to look for in a dyslexia-friendly app
1. Minimal text per screen
The best accessibility feature is a screen with one thing on it. When The One Thing shows a single task in large type, a dyslexic user reads perhaps five words to know exactly what to do. That’s the whole interaction. Compare that with scanning a scrollable list, parsing dates, badges and project labels.
This overlaps with what helps ADHD users — reduced clutter means reduced cognitive load for everyone. (See our piece on ADHD-friendly to-do lists; the audiences overlap a lot, and many people are both.)
2. Font choice — ideally OpenDyslexic as an option
Font research in dyslexia is genuinely mixed: studies show benefits for some readers from specialist fonts like OpenDyslexic (with its weighted letter bottoms that reduce letter-flipping), while others do best with clean sans-serifs like Verdana or Helvetica at generous sizes.
The honest conclusion: it’s individual, so it should be a setting. The One Thing ships with OpenDyslexic support built in and lets you toggle preferences rather than dictating one “correct” font.
3. Generous spacing and size
Letter spacing, line height and font size reliably help readability more than font family does. Look for apps with big type by default, breathing room between elements, and no dense multi-column layouts.
4. Low-stakes text entry
Dyslexic users often avoid tools that make them write under pressure. Good signs: forgiving free-text fields, no forced categorisation, autocorrect that helps rather than humiliates. A task note that says “cant find brand guidlines” does its job perfectly — the app should never make spelling feel like the point.
5. Icons and colour that carry meaning
When actions are marked by consistent colour and shape — a green tick, a red cross, an orange shuffle — you navigate by recognition instead of reading. Text labels become confirmation, not the primary channel.
Beyond reading: working memory and sequencing
Dyslexia commonly comes with working-memory and sequencing challenges. That’s why structure matters as much as typography:
- One decision at a time. An app that asks “what’s next?” against a full list is a sequencing task. An app that tells you what’s next removes it. This is why the one-task-at-a-time model works so well for dyslexic users — the app holds the sequence so your head doesn’t have to.
- Capture without ceremony. Thoughts must be recordable in seconds, before working memory drops them.
- Externalised blockers. Writing “stuck because X” down frees you from holding X in mind while you do something else. It also breaks the freeze we describe in our task paralysis guide.
Questions to ask of any productivity tool
Before committing to an app, check:
- Can I read the main screen in under five seconds?
- Can I change the font, size or spacing?
- Does it work if I never categorise anything?
- Does the most common action (see next task / add task) need zero reading of lists?
- Does it treat spelling as irrelevant?
If a tool fails most of these, it’s borrowing your reading budget to pay for its feature list.
Built dyslexic-first, better for everyone
The One Thing is our answer to these questions: one large-type task on screen, OpenDyslexic support, colour-coded actions, and instant capture. Designed by Tom, built by Dan — who is dyslexic and wanted a to-do list that didn’t fight him.
It’s free on iOS, Android and the web. One task at a time — because the most accessible screen is the one with almost nothing on it.