In the first two parts of this series, we looked at literacy and ADHD in school and at university. This final part is about the workplace, where some adults are only now realising why parts of their job have always felt harder than they should.
Some adults seek an ADHD assessment later in life, and waiting times can be long. For some, that means years of compensating without knowing why: staying late to reread documents, going back over meeting recordings, or relying on colleagues to remind them what was agreed.
At work, the difficulties often cluster in three places: meetings, the reading load, and writing that needs to be clear and accurate.
Meetings with Sensory Scribe: A meeting asks you to listen, contribute, follow the discussion and remember your actions, all at once. For some people with ADHD, the actions are what slip, and they’re often what matters most afterwards.
Sensory Scribe records in-person meetings and, by capturing computer audio, online meetings on Zoom or Microsoft Teams, with live captions as the discussion happens. Having a recording and transcript to refer back to can ease the pressure to listen and take detailed notes at the same time. A single click adds a coloured marker when an action or decision is discussed, and presentation slides can be loaded alongside the notes and transcript. Afterwards, searching the transcript can make it much easier to find an agreed action or deadline, although it’s worth checking important details, especially where speakers overlap. The Sensory Scribe iOS app can record meetings on an iPhone or iPad and transfer them to the desktop app later.
Recording a meeting should always follow your organisation’s policy, and colleagues should know when a meeting is being recorded. For confidential, personal or commercially sensitive discussions, follow your internal rules and agree how recordings will be stored, accessed and deleted. We looked at meetings from a dyslexia perspective in Dyslexia Awareness Week 2026, Part One: Meetings, Without Choosing Between Listening and Writing It Down, and much of it applies to ADHD too.
The reading load with Sensory Readable: Emails, policies, reports and long PDFs all compete for attention, and for some people with ADHD, the result is reading the same paragraph three times. On Windows, Sensory Readable reads aloud the text on screen in Outlook, Word, Edge, PDFs and many other apps, and a Mac version is included in the suite. The Readable Banner keeps a calm, scrolling line in view so it’s easier not to lose your place, and Sensory Ruler and Sensory Tint offer extra visual support for anyone who finds dense pages hard to work through. Optional ambient sounds, such as white noise, may help some people block out a noisy open-plan office.
Sensory Readable v3 can also recognise and read text in scanned documents and images, which may make a scanned contract or a photo of a whiteboard far more accessible, depending on the quality of the original.
Sensory Readable can read back your own writing too. Listening to an email before you send it can help you spot missing words or unfinished sentences that slip through when you’re working quickly through an inbox.
Privacy and Security: Sensory Readable’s text-to-speech and text recognition, Sensory Scribe’s captioning and transcription, are all processed on the user’s device rather than in the cloud. Sensory Scribe recordings and transcripts are saved locally by default, and they only go elsewhere if the user chooses to save or share them. This can make privacy conversations simpler, particularly for confidential meetings and sensitive documents. Local processing doesn’t replace an organisation’s own data-protection responsibilities, though, so the usual IT and data-protection checks still apply, including which software is approved and how recordings are stored and for how long.
Reasonable adjustments and Access to Work: Under the Equality Act 2010, employers have a duty to make reasonable adjustments for disabled employees, and assistive software is often one of the simplest and most cost-effective options to consider.
Access to Work is a separate government scheme in England, Scotland and Wales that can pay for practical support to help people start or stay in work. It doesn’t replace the employer’s responsibility to make reasonable adjustments. ADHD is one of the conditions GOV.UK gives as an example, and you can apply without a diagnosis, although you need to meet the eligibility criteria and support is assessed individually. Northern Ireland has its own Access to Work service. You can discuss whether Sensory Readable would meet your needs as part of an application, and funding decisions are made by the scheme.
If you think something like this would help, start with a conversation with your manager or HR about the specific tasks that take you longest: the meetings where actions slip, the documents you reread, the reports you put off. Concrete examples make it far easier to agree an adjustment, and trialling a tool on your real work is the best way to find out whether it helps.
Try Sensory Readable or Sensory Scribe free for 30 days. For workplace licences or an assessor copy for workplace needs assessors, email support@sensory-AT.com.