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About this tool
Preview line height, letter and word spacing and measure against WCAG 1.4.12 and British Dyslexia Association guidance.
Dyslexia Friendly Text Preview applies typographic settings to a live paragraph and checks them against two published standards: WCAG 2.2 success criterion 1.4.12 Text Spacing, which names 1.5× line height, 0.12 em letter spacing, 0.16 em word spacing and 2× paragraph spacing, and the British Dyslexia Association style guide, which asks for 12–14 pt body text, 60–70 characters a line, left alignment and bold rather than italics. It also scores the text itself with Flesch Reading Ease and the Flesch-Kincaid grade level, and hands back the settings as a CSS block.
Open Dyslexia Friendly Text Preview on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Paste or type the text you're working with.
Choose how it should be transformed or analyzed.
Copy the finished text into your document or post.
Every check cites either WCAG 1.4.12 or the British Dyslexia Association style guide, with the number it is testing.
The paragraph re-renders as you move each control, so the trade-off between measure and font size is visible.
The current settings come out as a ready-to-paste rule with font stack, spacing and max-width.
At least 1.5 times the font size. That is both the WCAG 1.4.12 Text Spacing value and the British Dyslexia Association recommendation, and it gives the eye enough vertical separation to find the start of the next line without re-reading the current one.
Success criterion 1.4.12 lists four: line height at least 1.5× the font size, space after a paragraph at least 2× the font size, letter spacing at least 0.12 em and word spacing at least 0.16 em. The criterion requires that content stay readable when a reader applies these, so a page must not clip or overlap text when they are forced on.
Fonts marketed for dyslexia have not shown a consistent reading-speed advantage in controlled studies. What does help is a plain sans-serif with clearly distinct letterforms, generous spacing and adequate size — which is why the BDA guide names ordinary faces such as Verdana, Tahoma, Trebuchet MS, Arial and Century Gothic.
Justification stretches the spaces between words to make both edges straight, which creates uneven gaps and vertical white 'rivers' running down the column. Those gaps make it harder to track along a line. Left-aligned text with a ragged right edge keeps word spacing constant.