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.” It’s a welcome shift. Dyslexia often gets talked about almost entirely as a school issue: reading ages, spelling tests, exam access arrangements. Then the conversation quietly stops the moment someone leaves education. Yet it doesn’t stop for the person. Dyslexia is lifelong, and an adult who struggled to follow a lesson while taking notes at sixteen is very likely to find the same thing difficult at thirty, just now in the form of a team meeting, a training session or an appraisal rather than a classroom or a worksheet.
This is the first 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. If you work with DSA or Access to Work assessments professionally, some of what follows will already be familiar; treat it as a way of putting the everyday case to colleagues who don’t. This piece looks at meetings and Sensory Scribe, the companion piece looks at reading and Sensory Readable.
Two of the BDA’s focus areas this year, workplace systems and communication, and management and career progression, show up most clearly in meetings: the briefings, training sessions, appraisals and catch-ups that make up a working week. Sensory Scribe, one of Sensory App House’s tools, answers a good part of that directly. It isn’t the whole answer; extra time, accessible formats and a proper workplace needs assessment all matter too.
The problem with listening and writing at the same time. The part of the day that gets the least attention is often the meeting itself. Briefings, training sessions, appraisals, team catch-ups: all of it asks someone to listen, follow what’s being said, and write it down accurately, at the same time, in real time. For a lot of dyslexic adults that’s a genuine cost, not a minor inconvenience, because holding spoken information in mind while spelling and structuring notes competes directly with actually following the discussion. Something has to give, and it’s often the listening.
Sensory Scribe works on that specific problem. It runs offline on the device, capturing what’s said in a meeting, lecture or training session and turning it into live on-screen captions as well as a saved transcript to go back at afterwards. Because nothing is recorded to a cloud service, the only copy of what’s often a confidential conversation, stays on the employee’s own machine.
Picture an appraisal conversation: instead of splitting attention between what a manager is saying and getting an accurate note of it, an employee can simply be in the conversation, and check the transcript afterwards for anything they want to revisit. That’s a small change with a disproportionate effect on how much of the meeting someone actually takes in, and it applies just as well to a training session or a project briefing as it does to a one-to-one. At the time of writing, a single perpetual workplace licence is £195 plus VAT, a one-off cost rather than a subscription, covering deployment across up to three machines for a single user.
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. An assessment centre briefing or a panel discussion asks candidates to listen and take in information under exactly the pressure Scribe is built for. For someone who loses track of a spoken briefing while trying to note it down, that can shape who gets shortlisted for reasons that have nothing to do with whether they can do the job. Making that kind of 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 meets 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 Scribe 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 those 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, 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 following a meeting than contributing to it, ask what would change that, and check back in a few weeks to see whether it worked. The second part of this series will look at the reading side of the same question, with Sensory Readable Suite.
To find out more visit our website, or email us support@sensory-AT.com.