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Studying and accessibility · Practical guide

Reading with ADHD, dyslexia or autism: what actually helps

Listening to the text while you read it, at the pace the voice sets, is one of the few techniques backed by research. Here's what the studies say and how to apply it for free to your own PDFs.

By Dravvt · September 2026 · 8 min read

A head drawn with tangled coloured threads that leave it as neat straight lines, with the title “Reading with ADHD, dyslexia or autism: what actually helps” and the dravvt logo

You reach the end of the page and have no idea what you just read. You go back to the top. You drift off again. If you have ADHD or dyslexia, or you're autistic, you probably know that feeling with long, dense texts. It isn't a lack of ability: your brain simply processes information differently from a neurotypical brain, and that's exactly why you need different tools.

The good news is that there's a simple technique with scientific backing: reading and listening to the text at the same time. In this article I explain why it works, who it helps most and how you can start using it today with your own PDF books and notes.

Reading with your eyes and your ears

When you read silently, all the work falls on your eyes and your attention: if your mind wanders, the text stops with you. When you also listen to it, the voice pulls you along and sets the pace.

A meta-analysis of 30 studies compared reading a text with reading it while listening to it (Clinton-Lisell, 2023). The most interesting finding was this: when the audio set the pace, comprehension clearly improved. The results also pointed to benefits for people who struggle with reading and for learning vocabulary in another language.

There's an important detail in the same study: when each person could stop and move on as they pleased, the advantage disappeared. The key is to let the voice set the pace, so you don't get stuck on the same line.

Dyslexia: where text-to-speech helps most

If you have dyslexia, decoding every word uses up much of your energy, leaving less for understanding what you read. With text-to-speech, the voice does the decoding and your mind can focus on the meaning.

It's not just a nice idea. A meta-analysis that pooled the studies on text-to-speech and read-aloud tools for students with reading difficulties found that these tools improve comprehension (Wood et al., 2018). That's why text-to-speech is one of the most common accommodations in schools and universities. Students also particularly value being able to control the speed of the voice (National Center on Educational Outcomes [NCEO], 2024).

The effect isn't the same for everyone, so the best thing is to try it yourself with your own texts.

ADHD: less load on your memory

A young person with curly hair, focused on reading on their phone by a window, with the title “ADHD: less load on your memory” and the dravvt logo

Understanding a text means holding what you've just read in your head while you process what comes next. That work depends on working memory, which tends to be under more strain with ADHD. An experiment with children showed this clearly: when reading placed more demands on working memory, the comprehension of children with ADHD dropped much more than that of the others (Kofler et al., 2019).

Anything that eases that load helps. That's why reading and listening at the same time makes so much sense with ADHD:

  • The voice sets the pace, so you don't have to force yourself to keep going.
  • The highlight shows you where you are: if you get distracted, you're back on the line in a second.
  • Hearing and seeing the text at once gives you two ways to follow the thread.

ADHD and dyslexia also often occur together, and in those cases reading difficulties tend to be greater (Germanò et al., 2010). A tool that helps with both is worth twice as much.

Autism: text that adapts to you

Two smiling people at an outdoor table with their phones, with the title “Autism: text that adapts to you” and the dravvt logo

Autistic people have very different reading profiles. A meta-analysis of 36 studies found that what most influences comprehension isn't the diagnosis but vocabulary and how easily someone decodes words (Brown et al., 2013). So there's no single recipe: what helps is being able to adjust reading to you.

Many autistic people are also sensitive to bright light, glare, visual clutter or noise, and the National Autistic Society (n.d.) recommends reducing those stimuli. On a screen, that means being able to choose the colours, remove distractions and adjust the text size. It's also the idea behind Universal Design for Learning: there's no single way of presenting information that's best for everyone, so it pays to be able to choose (CAST, 2024).

How I do it: ReadAloud

I study remotely, and all my books are PDFs in German, which isn't my first language. Reading page after page like that wore me out, so I built myself a study tool: ReadAloud. It turns your PDFs into a page that reads itself aloud and highlights the paragraph being spoken, so you can read and listen at the same time at the pace the voice sets. It's one of my programming projects, and it's free and open source.

The voice comes from Piper, a “fast and local neural” text-to-speech engine (Open Home Foundation, n.d.). Neural means it runs on a neural network, a type of artificial intelligence, which is why it sounds far more natural than the robotic voices of the past. And local means that AI runs entirely on your computer: the text is never sent to a server. It's the same idea I explain in how to run AI agents locally, and if these topics interest you, there's more in my technology articles.

Everything you've read above is built in:

  • Read and listen at the same time, with the paragraph highlighted: the technique with the most research behind it.
  • Adjust the speed of the voice, which is what students who use text-to-speech value most.
  • Choose your colours and the size of the text and the width of the column, for comfortable reading.
  • It remembers where you stopped in every book, so you can pick up without losing the thread.
  • Natural voices in English and German, ideal if you study in another language too.
  • Free, no account and offline: your books never leave your computer.

👉 Download ReadAloud for Windows for free

Habits that help

The technique works even better if you pair it with a couple of simple habits:

  • Take fixed breaks. In a study with university students, those who followed fixed breaks, as in the Pomodoro technique (for example, 24 minutes of study and 6 of rest), felt more focused and less tired than those who took breaks whenever they felt like it (Biwer et al., 2023).
  • Leave your phone in another room. Having it nearby slightly affects your memory while you study (Böttger et al., 2023), and out of reach there are no notifications pulling you out of the text.
  • Split the text into short chunks and sum up each one in your own words: that eases the load on your working memory.

What you don't need to buy

Some heavily advertised products aren't backed by research, so you can save your money:

  • Coloured overlays and glasses: a review of more than 50 studies concluded that they can't be recommended for reading difficulties (Griffiths et al., 2016).
  • Special dyslexia fonts: they didn't improve reading speed or accuracy in trials (International Dyslexia Association, 2018). Use whatever font feels comfortable; in a study with Spanish-speaking readers with dyslexia, plain, non-italic fonts worked best (Rello & Baeza-Yates, 2013).

Frequently asked questions

Why is reading so hard for me with ADHD?
One likely reason is working memory: to understand a text you have to hold on to what you've just read while you keep reading, and with ADHD that memory tends to be under more strain (Kofler et al., 2019). Listening to the text while you read it helps you keep the pace and not lose the thread.
What actually helps with reading with dyslexia?
Text-to-speech is one of the best-supported tools: a meta-analysis found that it improves comprehension for students with reading difficulties (Wood et al., 2018), and it's a common accommodation in schools and universities.
Can ADHD and dyslexia occur together?
Yes, and it's common. When they occur together, the difficulties tend to be greater than with either one alone (Germanò et al., 2010), so it's worth talking to a professional about it.
Can you read and listen at the same time?
Yes, and it works best when the audio sets the pace: in that case, comprehension clearly improved in the studies (Clinton-Lisell, 2023).
Does listening to an audiobook count as reading?
For following a story, largely yes: reading and listening lead to similar comprehension. For studying in depth, it helps to have the text in front of you as well (Clinton-Lisell, 2022), which is why reading and listening at the same time is the best combination.
Does bionic reading help with ADHD?
Bionic reading puts the beginning of each word in bold. So far, there are no scientific studies showing that it improves reading, with or without ADHD.
Does ReadAloud work in Spanish, on a Mac or on a phone?
For now it runs on Windows and reads in English and German. It's free and open source, and you can see how it's built on its page.

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