As set out in the previous article, Dyslexia Awareness Week runs from 5th to 11th October 2026, and the British Dyslexia Association has set this year’s theme as “Dyslexia in real life: at work.” As we already know, dyslexia is lifelong, and an adult who found reading difficult at sixteen is very likely to find the same thing difficult at thirty, just now in the form of a policy document, a PDF report or a full inbox rather than a GCSE text.
This is the second of two pieces written mainly for employers and managers who want to know what a reasonable adjustment actually looks like in practice, rather than in policy language. The first piece in this series looked at meetings and Sensory Scribe; this one looks at reading and Sensory Readable.
Reading is where two of the BDA’s other focus areas this year land most clearly: recruitment, and access to reasonable adjustments generally. A job specification, a policy, an email or a PDF report all ask the same thing, get through this at the speed and accuracy the job requires, and that’s where Sensory Readable, one of Sensory App House’s own tools, answers a good part of the question directly. It isn’t the whole answer; extra time, accessible formats and a proper workplace needs assessment all matter too, but it’s the part we can speak to directly.
A reading barrier isn’t only about recognising words. A reasonable adjustment doesn’t have to mean a new system or singling someone out. In most workplaces, the barrier isn’t the content of an email, a policy, a PDF report or a form, it’s getting through it at the speed and accuracy the job requires. Sensory Readable reads any of that back, in Word, in a browser, in a PDF, with the text highlighted as it’s spoken, and its OCR handles scanned letters and printed forms too, not just text that was already digital. It carries some writing support as well: spellcheck and an editor, a word-lookup for quick definitions, and integration with Windows’ own dictation tools, so drafting an email or a report doesn’t rest entirely on typing and spelling at the same time.
Reading isn’t only a word-recognition problem, and Sensory Readable doesn’t treat it as one. Many people with dyslexia also experience visual stress: text that seems to shimmer or move on the page, glare off a bright screen, or letters that crowd together and become harder to tell apart. Sensory Tint lets someone apply a colour overlay, switch to mono view or night mode, and adjust for colour vision; Sensory Ruler helps focus on the line or section being read, so the eye doesn’t lose its place; Sensory Fonts offers a choice of typefaces designed to reduce that crowding and aid letter recognition. These sit alongside the reading and writing tools in the same Sensory Readable Suite package, so the visual side of the barrier and the word-recognition side are both covered without needing a second piece of software.
None of that requires an organisation to change its systems or document formats. The adjustment sits on top of whatever the business already uses, which matters more than it sounds: a lot of workplace barriers for dyslexic staff come from software and processes that were never designed with them in mind, and redesigning those is rarely quick or within one employee’s control. It also runs entirely offline: nothing is sent to an external server to generate speech or process a scanned document, everything stays on the machine it’s installed on, which tends to make an IT or data-protection sign-off considerably more straightforward than it would be for a cloud-based tool, even though it still goes through the usual IT and procurement steps like anything else. At the time of writing, a perpetual workplace licence is £195 plus VAT, a one-off cost rather than a subscription, and covers deployment across up to three machines for a single user, useful for anyone splitting time between an office desktop and a laptop at home.
Recruitment is part of this too. Reasonable adjustments aren’t only something that starts once someone has a contract, and recruitment is one of the BDA’s four focus areas this year. A job specification, an application portal, or a timed written exercise can carry exactly the same barriers described above, long before anyone sits down for an interview. For someone who reads slowly under time pressure, that can shape who gets shortlisted for reasons that have nothing to do with whether they can do the job. Making reading support available at the recruitment stage, not just after someone starts, keeps the process closer to testing the right thing.
The legal and funding picture. Dyslexia can meet the legal definition of disability under the Equality Act 2010, where it has a substantial, long-term effect on someone’s ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities, and where it does, employers have a legal duty to make reasonable adjustments. Software like Sensory Readable is one way of meeting that duty, not a substitute for it.
Access to Work is a separate, related scheme worth knowing about. It doesn’t fund reasonable adjustments themselves, those remain the employer’s responsibility, but it can fund support beyond that duty following a workplace assessment, and cost-sharing between government and employer can apply after someone’s first six weeks in a role, depending on the size of the business. It covers England, Scotland and Wales, with a different system in Northern Ireland. For readers who work with DSA and Access to Work assessors, none of this will be new; for an employer weighing up a first adjustment, it’s worth knowing that there’s a funded assessment route available, and worth asking about it before assuming the whole cost sits with the business.
None of this is about giving anyone an advantage they haven’t earned. A reasonable adjustment removes a barrier that was never part of the job in the first place, reading speed, spelling under pressure, picking information off a crowded page, so that what’s actually being judged is the work itself. The practical starting point is usually simple: notice where someone is spending more effort on the format of a task than the task itself, ask what would remove that, and check back in a few weeks to see whether it worked. The first part of this series looked at the same question in meetings, with Sensory Scribe.
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