Free Dyslexia-Friendly Reformatter

Worked example

The box starts empty. Press "Try a sample" and the preview shows two paragraphs in Lexend at 20 px, with "Line height" 1.8×, "Letter spacing" 6%, "Word spacing" 4 px, "Line width" 58 and the "Cream" background. Tick "Bold word starts" and the first 40% of each word turns bold, so "Paste" shows Pa in bold and "reading." shows read. Tick "Underline long words" and the four words with nine or more letters get a teal underline: increases, comfortable, background and Everything. Change "Layout" to "One sentence per line" and the two paragraphs become four short blocks. Press "Large print" under "Presets:" for 28 px text. Then "Download .html" saves a file called reformatted-text.html that opens in any browser, offline.

Which settings to use, and the limits

• Start from a preset, then adjust one slider at a time. "BDA style guide" sets 19 px text, line height 1.5, word spacing 5 px and line width 60. "Large print" sets 28 px, 1.8, 6 px and 50. "Max spacing" sets letter spacing 15% and word spacing 12 px. Presets change size and spacing only, never the font, background or bold. "Reset" returns every setting, including font, background and bold, to its default. The sliders run from 14 to 32 px for "Size", 1.2 to 3.0 for "Line height", 0 to 20% for "Letter spacing", 0 to 16 px for "Word spacing" and 30 to 90 for "Line width". On a phone the preview stays pinned above the controls, and "Shorter preview" makes it smaller.
• Choose the font and the colours that you read best on. "Font" offers Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, Andika and Comic Neue, which are built in, plus "Verdana" and "Georgia (serif)", which use the copy installed on your device. "Background" has cream, yellow, peach, blue, green, lilac and grey tints, "Dark: cream on charcoal" and "High contrast: yellow on black". "Text colour" is "Automatic" by default, which picks dark text on a light tint and the right colour for the two dark themes. Your settings are saved in this browser, so they are still there next time.
• Break dense text into smaller pieces with "Layout". "Keep paragraphs" only splits where there is a blank line. "Break long paragraphs" splits a paragraph of more than 220 characters at sentence ends into blocks of up to 220 characters, and never cuts inside a sentence, so one long sentence stays whole. "One sentence per line" puts every sentence in its own block. Sentence ends are found by your browser's sentence splitter, which can end a line after an abbreviation such as "Mr." or "Dr.", so look through the result.
• Try the reading cues, and keep the ones that help. "Bold word starts" bolds the first 40% of each word, rounded up, with at least one character, so "reading" shows "rea" in bold followed by "ding". The page calls it a cue some readers find makes text flow faster, so treat it as a personal choice. "Underline long words" underlines words with nine or more letters or digits. Both cues are included when you copy or download. Arabic-script paragraphs get neither bold starts nor letter spacing, because they break joined letters.
• Use "Reading focus" and "Read aloud" to keep your place. "Reading ruler" dims the text above and below a band as tall as one line of text. Move your finger or mouse over the preview, or click it and use the up and down arrow keys, to move the band. "One paragraph at a time" fades the other paragraphs and adds "Previous paragraph" and "Next paragraph" buttons with a counter such as "1 of 2". "Read aloud" speaks the text with your device's voices in the page language, and "Reading speed" runs from 0.5× to 2.0×. The button is not shown if the browser has no speech support.
• Take the result with you. "Copy formatted text" copies styled text, so pasting into a word processor or email keeps the spacing, size, colours and bold; an app that accepts plain text gets the plain words. "Download .html" saves a self-contained page. "Save as PDF" opens the print dialog, where you choose "Save as PDF" as the printer, and it prints only the preview. The font list in copied and downloaded files names fallbacks, so Lexend falls back to Atkinson Hyperlegible, then Verdana, on a device without it. A "None" background is exported as white.

Common problems and how to fix them

It says "Could not read that file. Please choose a .txt, .md, .docx or .pdf file."

The file was read but gave an error or no text. This happens with a damaged file, an empty file, or a file that is not really the type its name says. "Load a text file" and drag-and-drop accept .txt, .md, .docx and .pdf. A Word .docx gives its text only, so tables, images and headings are not carried over. If the file keeps failing, open it in another program and copy the text, then paste it into the box.

It says "No selectable text was found in that PDF. It may be a scan."

The tool reads the text layer of a PDF and does not recognise letters in pictures. A scanned page is a picture, so there is nothing to read. It reads up to 300 pages. Run the scan through a program that can recognise text first, then load the result or paste it in.

The text comes out as one big block, or the lines of a PDF run together.

Paragraphs are split only at blank lines. Text copied from a PDF often has a line break at the end of every line and no blank lines, and a single line break is shown as a space, so it becomes one paragraph. Put a blank line between paragraphs, or set "Layout" to "One sentence per line" or "Break long paragraphs" to get shorter blocks.

It says "Could not copy. Select the preview text and copy it by hand."

Both the styled copy and the plain-text copy were refused by the browser, which can happen when clipboard access is blocked. If only the styled copy is unavailable, the tool copies plain words instead and you lose the spacing and colours. Select the text in the preview and copy it yourself, or use "Download .html" and open that file.

It says "Letter spacing and bold word starts are not applied to Arabic-script text, because they break its joined letters."

The note appears when the text contains Arabic-script paragraphs and letter spacing is above 0 or "Bold word starts" is ticked. Those paragraphs are shown with no extra letter spacing and no bold starts, while the other settings still apply, including size, line height, word spacing and the background. Mixed text keeps spacing in its Latin paragraphs.

How it compares

This tool restyles text you give it. It does not change a web page or a PDF in place, and it keeps only the words, not images, tables or headings. A browser's reader mode or your word processor's own styles are the route for restyling a whole page or document. The settings here, wide spacing, tall lines, a capped line width and a soft tint, are the ones the page describes as most consistently shown to help dyslexic readers. The page describes bold word starts only as "a cue some readers find makes text flow faster", so treat it as a personal choice. Try the settings and keep what is comfortable. This is a reading aid, not a diagnosis.