Dyslexia strategies at work: 8 situations, solved

How to use this guide

Jump to the section that describes where you are right now. Each situation has a practical strategy you can use today — no disclosure required — and a note on the formal adjustment that removes the problem more permanently.

The workarounds in each section are not character-building exercises. Re-reading the same email five times is unpaid cognitive work. The strategies here are about reducing that work, not normalising it.

1. Email and written communication

The email read five times before sending is not a quirk. It is a symptom of phonological processing working harder than it needs to — and the fix is not proofreading more carefully, it is changing the review method.

Listening to text catches errors that re-reading misses. When you read your own writing, your brain auto-corrects familiar errors because it knows what you meant to type. Text-to-speech plays back exactly what is written, not what you intended. Microsoft's built-in Read Aloud (Alt + Ctrl + Space in Outlook) is free and requires no installation.

Tone anxiety — the loop of "does this sound rude, does this sound desperate, does this sound like I can't write" — is a different problem. The email tone checker reads your draft and flags the specific phrases that are likely to land badly, so you are checking against something concrete rather than your own anxious re-reading.

Formal adjustment to ask for: extra review time before sending client-facing communications, or access to a grammar/AI writing tool funded through Access to Work.

2. Meetings and verbal processing

Dyslexia affects working memory alongside phonological processing. That is why meetings feel cognitively expensive — you are listening, processing, holding context, and deciding what to say next, all at once. When the agenda changes mid-meeting, the load spikes.

The single biggest meeting adjustment is pre-reading. An agenda sent 24 hours in advance — with papers attached, not "to follow" — lets you load the context before the room demands it. This is a reasonable adjustment your employer can implement at zero cost. It is also one of the most commonly granted.

For retention: AI transcription (Otter.ai, Microsoft Teams live captions, Google Meet transcripts) turns the meeting into a searchable document. You can review the transcript instead of relying on notes taken under pressure. All three have free tiers.

Formal adjustment to ask for: agendas and papers sent 24 hours in advance; transcription software enabled for all meetings you attend.

3. Minute-taking and documentation

Minute-taking is the meeting task that disproportionately falls to people who are least equipped to do it quickly. For dyslexic employees, simultaneous listening and accurate transcription under time pressure is one of the hardest combinations possible.

The practical fix is transcription-first, edit-later. Record the meeting (with consent), let the AI transcription tool generate a draft, then edit the draft into minutes at your own pace. The cognitive load shifts from real-time production to post-hoc editing — a very different task.

If the expectation is that you take minutes in rotation, this is a legitimate adjustment to request: either exemption from the rota, or access to a recording/transcription tool when it is your turn. Both are documented as reasonable adjustments in the Job Accommodation Network's guidance (JAN, askjan.org, 2025).

Formal adjustment to ask for: permission to record meetings for personal note-taking purposes, or rotation from minute-taking duties in favour of a different contribution.

4. Presentations

Two specific problems come up in almost every account of dyslexia and presentations: typos on slides spotted mid-delivery, and the pressure of reading text aloud that you have not pre-processed.

For slides: build a pre-delivery checklist that includes running the presentation through text-to-speech before the room sees it. Catching "pubic" instead of "public" in your own kitchen is less damaging than in front of 40 colleagues. Microsoft PowerPoint's built-in Read Aloud does this in under two minutes for a standard deck.

For reading aloud: practice changes the experience entirely. A single read-through at home the night before — out loud, not silently — moves the content from unfamiliar text into pre-loaded speech. The words stop being a decoding task and become a retrieval task, which is significantly less effortful for dyslexic brains.

Formal adjustment to ask for: slides submitted as speaker notes rather than read-aloud scripts; presentation time extended by 10% to allow for processing pauses.

5. Performance reviews

"Attention to detail" is one of the most common appraisal phrases applied to dyslexic employees. It sounds like feedback on effort. In many cases it is feedback on an unsupported cognitive difference — and when adjustments have been requested and refused, it can cross a legal line.

Under UK employment law, a performance management process that penalises disability-related difficulties without considering adjustments first can constitute disability discrimination under the Equality Act 2010. UK employment tribunal cases citing neurodiversity reached 517 in 2025, up 95% in five years (Irwin Mitchell, February 2026). Dyslexia is among the most frequently cited conditions.

The practical implication: document your adjustment requests. If you have asked for something and been refused, or asked and received no response, that paper trail matters. If you have not asked yet, the appraisal cycle is a reasonable trigger to start.

Formal adjustment to ask for: appraisal questions shared in writing in advance; written feedback provided alongside verbal delivery; quality metrics that account for the workaround time your role requires.

6. Open-plan offices

Open-plan environments generate auditory distraction that is disproportionately costly for dyslexic employees. When working memory is already under load from a reading or writing task, background conversation competes for the same cognitive resource.

Noise-cancelling headphones are the most widely used self-funded solution. They reduce involuntary attention capture — the cognitive process where your brain interrupts what it is doing to process nearby speech — and the research on focus improvement in open-plan settings is consistent (multiple workplace cognition studies, 2018–2024). Most employers do not object to headphone use at a desk.

For tasks requiring extended concentration: a quiet room, a focus pod, or a formal work-from-home arrangement on high-demand days are all documented as reasonable adjustments for dyslexia. The adjustment is not "I find it noisy" — it is "sustained reading and writing tasks take significantly longer in high-distraction environments, with a measurable impact on output quality."

Formal adjustment to ask for: access to a quiet workspace for focus tasks; a regular work-from-home day aligned to your heaviest documentation days.

7. Screen-sharing and remote work

Screen-sharing introduces a specific cognitive stressor: visible real-time errors. The knowledge that your half-finished sentence, your autocorrect failure, or your browser tabs are visible to the call raises the cognitive stakes of every keystroke.

Three things reduce this: drafting in a separate document before pasting into the visible window; sharing only the application rather than the full desktop; and turning off autocorrect notifications during calls so corrections are not flagged in real time.

For remote-first roles: the written-communication volume is higher than in office environments, and the informal verbal catchups that let dyslexic employees verify understanding are fewer. Asynchronous video tools (Loom, Teams video messages) let you communicate complex points verbally without the simultaneous processing demands of a live call.

Formal adjustment to ask for: option to share by application rather than full screen; asynchronous video tools provided and normalised for team communication.

8. Senior leadership and board-level work

Seniority increases written communication volume, not decreases it. Board papers, executive summaries, and strategic reports arrive faster than it is comfortable to read them, and the expectation is that you have read them before the meeting starts.

The most effective senior-level strategy is delegated reading: a trusted direct report who produces a 200-word brief on each board paper before the meeting. This is not a workaround — it is how many non-dyslexic senior leaders already operate. For dyslexic leaders, formalising it removes the pretence of having read a 40-page pack at 11pm.

Text-to-speech on the commute handles the remainder. Feeding board documents into a TTS app and listening at 1.3x speed on the way in is consistent, repeatable, and keeps the evening free. See the board pack scenario article for the exact workflow and tool setup.

On disclosure at senior level: the stakes are different, the legal protections are the same. The disclosure decision guide covers the specific dynamics of senior-level disclosure — including how to frame adjustments without signalling vulnerability to a board.

Formal adjustment to ask for: board papers circulated 72 hours in advance (rather than 24); executive summaries required on all papers over 10 pages.

Getting adjustments in place

Most of the formal adjustments in this guide require a conversation with your employer. That conversation goes better when you describe the specific functional difficulty — not the diagnosis — and pair it with a specific, low-cost solution.

"I find it harder to process verbal information and written information simultaneously, and I work significantly better when I have documents in advance" is a more effective opener than "I have dyslexia and need adjustments."

If your employer has declined adjustments without engaging properly with the request, that may have legal implications. The Access to Work guide covers funded support that sits alongside employer adjustments — including coaching and assistive software the employer does not need to fund themselves.