OplæsApps for dyslexia on iPhone
Start with what’s already on the phone. Speak Screen reads any screen aloud. Accessibility Reader (iOS 26 and later) puts the text in a clean view with the font, colors and spacing you like, and Books has a Line Guide that dims everything except the line you’re on. If writing is the hard part, dictate instead of typing. For long texts, reading apps add natural voices and remember where you stopped, and in the US, Learning Ally has human-read textbooks. Skip the special dyslexia fonts: two studies found they don’t make reading faster or more accurate.
Hear the text: Speak Screen and Speak Selection
Turn both on under Settings › Accessibility › Read & Speak (Spoken Content on iOS 17 and 18). Swipe down with two fingers from the top of the screen to hear everything on it, or select a few lines and tap Speak. Under Highlighting you can have each word light up as it’s read, so your eyes have something to follow.
Step by step: how to make your iPhone read text aloud.
A calmer page: Accessibility Reader
On iOS 26 and later, Accessibility Reader shows the text of the app you’re in full-screen, without the ads and menus around it. Open it from Control Center, from the Share menu, or by triple-clicking the side button once you’ve added it to the Accessibility Shortcut. Then set it up the way you read best: text and background colors, font and size, bold text, and more space between lines, words and letters. With the system font there’s also a High Legibility Characters switch. The play button reads the text aloud and highlights as it goes.
It’s built into the Magnifier app too, so a letter from school or a restaurant menu can be read the same way. Apple’s guide: Read or listen to text in apps with Accessibility Reader.
One line at a time in Books
Open a book in Apple Books, tap the page and turn on Line Guide from the menu at the bottom. The rest of the page dims; tap above or below the line to move it. Under Themes & Settings › Customize you can also give lines, words and letters more room.
Apple’s guide: Read books in the Books app. Want the book read to you as well? See how to make Apple Books read aloud.
Write by talking
Tap the microphone on the keyboard and speak, and the iPhone types for you. Then select what you wrote and let Speak Selection read it back. Hearing your own sentence is often the quickest way to notice a word that’s missing.
Reading apps worth knowing
- Oplæs, which I made: it reads PDFs, ePub books, web articles and photos of pages aloud in natural English and Danish voices, highlights every word and remembers where you stopped. Everything runs on the iPhone, so nothing is uploaded. $1.99 once, no subscription.
- Speechify reads in many languages. Its free plan has basic voices, and Premium is a subscription (is Speechify free?).
- Learning Ally has human-narrated audiobooks, including textbooks, for people with dyslexia. It’s US only and costs $135 a year (learningally.org).
- Bookshare is an accessible ebook library supported by the U.S. Department of Education. Its free Bookshare Reader app reads aloud with highlighting (bookshare.org).
Prices and privacy for more reading apps: Speechify alternatives for iPhone.
Do dyslexia fonts help?
OpenDyslexic and Dyslexie get recommended a lot, but the research doesn’t back them up. A 2017 study in Annals of Dyslexia found no improvement in reading rate or accuracy with OpenDyslexic. In a 2018 study of 170 children with dyslexia, Dyslexie neither helped nor hurt, and most of the children preferred Arial.
So use whichever font you find comfortable. More space between lines and letters is worth a try, and takes ten seconds in Accessibility Reader or Books.