Dyslexia's biggest workplace problem is memory, not reading

A 2025 study of 400 employed UK adults found that dyslexia traits predict 3 types of workplace cognitive failure: memory, attention, and action. The finding held after the researchers controlled for age, how busy participants were, their routine, Big Five personality traits, mental wellbeing, and self-reported ADHD symptoms. Every obvious confounding variable was accounted for. Dyslexia traits still predicted workplace cognitive failures.

You know how this shows up. You lose the thread halfway through a meeting and can't work out when it happened. You come back to a task after an interruption and can't remember where you were. You know something was agreed on the call, and you genuinely can't reconstruct what it was by the time you sit down to act on it.

Most workplaces file all of this under "reading problem" and offer a coloured overlay, larger text, or nothing. For many dyslexic employees, those things don't address the friction that costs the most time every day.

What a 2025 study of 400 workers found

Smith-Spark and Huang (Behavioral Sciences, November 2025; DOI: 10.3390/bs15111582; PMC12649733) at London South Bank University recruited 400 UK adults in full- or part-time employment. They measured workplace cognitive failures using the Workplace Cognitive Failure Scale (Wallace & Chen, 2005), a validated 15-item questionnaire covering 3 failure types.

Memory failures: forgetting familiar work-related information you know well. Attention failures: losing focus on task-relevant information while working. Action failures: carrying out the wrong action or making procedural slips.

After accounting for every other factor, dyslexia traits were a significant positive predictor of all 3 failure types: memory (standardised beta = 0.257, p < 0.001), attention (beta = 0.196, p < 0.001), and action (beta = 0.201, p < 0.001). Statistically significant across a 400-person sample with full controls.

The authors were direct about the implication: "Understanding the ways in which dyslexia traits can influence workplace cognition beyond reading and spelling difficulties is important in detecting underlying and undiagnosed neurodevelopmental problems in workers in jobs where literacy skills are not to the fore, but which nevertheless draw upon other aspects of cognition that are affected."

The phrase "beyond reading and spelling" is doing the real work. Most employer dyslexia policies don't get that far. The British Dyslexia Association describes dyslexia as affecting short-term memory, processing speed, and the sequencing of information (BDA, bdadyslexia.org.uk, 2026). Visual processing is a separate mechanism.

If your employer's understanding of dyslexia starts and ends with reading, this research gives you the evidence to say that's not the full picture. Print the citation: Smith-Spark & Huang, Behavioral Sciences 2025, DOI 10.3390/bs15111582.

Memory failures: the things you keep forgetting

The memory factor in the study measured how often workers forget familiar work-related information. Things they already know. The phone extension. The meeting time they checked 10 minutes ago. The point they were about to make before someone spoke over them.

The British Dyslexia Association's description of dyslexia includes difficulties with short-term memory and processing speed (BDA, 2026). Short-term memory difficulties at work mean information that arrives verbally — in meetings, quick verbal handovers, spoken instructions — is harder to hold long enough to act on.

This is a retrieval problem, not a storage problem. The information gets in. It doesn't stay accessible long enough for you to use it. That's a different thing from "not understanding," and it requires a different fix.

The adjustment that addresses memory failures is written confirmation: a follow-up email after a verbal instruction, meeting notes with the agreed actions listed, agendas sent in advance so you can preload the structure before the meeting starts. These are established reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act 2010 (UK) and the ADA (US).

If you're consistently forgetting things you know, the formal adjustment to ask for is written confirmation of any verbal instruction or agreement. You can frame this as a record-keeping preference if you're not ready to disclose, or as a formal reasonable adjustment if you are.

Attention failures: losing the thread

The attention factor measured how often workers lose focus on task-relevant information while working. This is specifically about holding attention on a task while processing its content. General distraction is a different mechanism.

Re-reading an email three times before sending is this mechanism in action. Each pass through the text costs cognitive effort. You're reading, processing, and simultaneously checking whether what you've read matches what you meant to write. The effort of re-reading competes with the effort of composing, and somewhere in that loop you lose the thread.

The same happens in meetings. You're tracking what's being said, trying to take notes, and managing the prospect of being asked to respond. The cognitive load is higher than it is for most people in the room, and the gap between what was said and what you can reconstruct afterwards is where errors and misunderstandings enter.

The masking cost calculator can put a number on this for your salary. Enter your re-reading time, your meeting prep workarounds, and the tool tells you what those minutes cost per year. For many dyslexic employees, the annual figure runs into thousands of pounds or dollars of unpaid working time.

The adjustments that address attention failures are structural. A no-cold-calling agreement in team meetings means you're not managing the stress of being asked to respond while simultaneously trying to process content. Single-task working blocks, protected from interruption, mean you can give complex tasks the full processing time they need. Written agendas before meetings mean you can prepare in advance rather than arriving to process everything in real time.

The adjustment to ask for is structural: advance agendas, written meeting summaries, and an agreement that you won't be cold-called in group settings. These are common governance practices. You don't have to frame them as disability accommodations to request them, though you can.

Action failures: doing the wrong thing

The action factor measured something distinct from memory or attention: failures to carry out the intended action. Procedural slips. Starting a task and doing it a different, wrong way. Working through a multi-step process and skipping a step, or completing the steps out of sequence.

This is the experience of sending an email before adding the attachment you mentioned. Filling in a form and realising you completed the wrong section. Filing a document in a folder that felt right but wasn't. Starting to book a room for Tuesday and booking it for Thursday.

The mechanism is the gap between knowing the correct sequence and executing it under real working conditions. Competing demands on attention and memory close that gap while you're in the middle of the task.

The Job Accommodation Network (JAN, askjan.org) lists checklists, step-by-step written processes, and structured task sequences as established reasonable accommodations for dyslexic employees in exactly this category. An agreed checklist catches the gap between intention and execution before it becomes a problem. Most non-dyslexic colleagues carry the same checklist in their heads.

Action failures are also where masking costs run highest. Fixing procedural errors takes time. Rechecking completed work takes time. Building your own quality-control loop, because you can't rely on first-pass accuracy, is unpaid work that most non-dyslexic colleagues don't carry.

For action failures, ask for written step-by-step instructions for any multi-stage task, and agreement that using checklists is your standard working method. Neither of these requires disclosure if you'd rather not raise it. Both are reasonable to request on their own terms.

What this means for your adjustments

Here's the call: if your employer's dyslexia support is coloured overlays and a link to a large-font document, you're not getting adjustments for the cognitive failures that cost the most time.

The Smith-Spark and Huang (2025) study is specific about this: their findings should "be considered in support plans, workplace interventions, and the design and provision of assistive technology for workers with formal diagnoses of dyslexia." Support plans. Workplace interventions. Not just reading support.

In practice, here's what adjustments look like for each failure type:

• Memory: Written follow-up of any verbal instruction or agreement. Meeting agendas sent in advance. Time to review material before being asked to act on it. Recurring tasks documented in writing rather than passed on verbally.
• Attention: No cold-calling in group meetings. Written meeting summaries with agreed actions listed. Single-task working blocks, protected from interruption. Complex tasks assigned with lead time, not at short notice.
• Action: Written step-by-step instructions for multi-stage tasks. Agreement to use personal checklists as a standard method. A review window before submission of important work. No time-pressure rushing on tasks where sequence matters.

The reasonable adjustments builder generates a specific, personalised adjustment request based on your challenges, including the working memory and attention difficulties that don't appear in a standard reading support plan. It takes about two minutes and produces a draft email you can send to HR or your manager.

On the legal position: you don't need a formal dyslexia diagnosis for your employer's duty to apply. Under the Equality Act 2010, the duty to make reasonable adjustments arises when an employer knows, or ought reasonably to know, about your difficulties. ACAS confirmed this in updated guidance (January 2025). The disclosure decision guide walks through how to raise your situation, whether you're diagnosed or not.

For US employees, the ADA covers cognitive difficulties including working memory and processing speed as part of dyslexia's protected profile. The Job Accommodation Network at askjan.org has specific guidance on accommodations for learning disabilities in workplace settings.

The research says dyslexia's workplace impact is broader than the reading frame most employers use. Your adjustment request can match what the evidence says, not what the HR policy assumes.