Around 10% of the UK workforce is dyslexic, and being promoted to director level doesn't change that number (BDA, 2026). What promotion changes is the format of the exposure. As an attendee in a board meeting you can contribute where you've prepared and hold back on sections you haven't fully absorbed. As the person presenting your department's performance, you are working through a live document on a screen in front of people who have been running organisations for longer than some of your direct reports have been employed.

The preparation side is manageable. By the time you walk in, you know your material. Text-to-speech on the commute, AI summaries the evening before, a process for checking your own numbers twice: all of that is covered in the board pack system article. The problem is what happens between walking in and sitting back down.

The CFO asks you to go back to the revenue table. Someone raises a point from the appendix. The CEO asks you to skip ahead. All of that requires rapid movement through a visual document while simultaneously forming a verbal response, under time pressure, with everyone watching.

Dyslexia affects phonological processing and working memory (BDA, 2024). Live board Q&A stresses both simultaneously. The cognitive load is high for any presenter. Add the working memory component and the margin for error closes quickly.

The four strategies below address the live problem. Each is either standard presentation practice or indistinguishable from it. None require you to disclose your dyslexia. All four are reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act 2010 if you want them in writing.

Why live presenting hits differently from preparing

Board preparation is a reading and comprehension problem. You have time. You can re-read a paragraph. You can process at your own pace and use the tools that work for you.

Presenting to the board is a retrieval and location problem. You have the deck on screen. The room has it on their tablets. A question arrives that requires you to find a specific slide, recall a specific number, or connect two sections of your own presentation. You need to do all of that while looking composed and staying in the room conversationally.

Working memory difficulties are among the most consistently documented impacts of dyslexia at work, across severity levels and career stages (BDA, 2024). Seniority doesn't reduce the working memory load. A board presentation often increases it, because the stakes are higher and visible hesitation costs more in that room than it does almost anywhere else.

10%

Approximate proportion of the UK workforce affected by dyslexia (BDA, 2026). This figure does not fall at director level. The Equality Act 2010 duty to make reasonable adjustments applies throughout, including the boardroom.

The preparation tools work. The live tools are different. What follows is the live toolkit.

If the preparation problem is solved but the meeting room still feels unpredictable, the gap is structural. Structural problems have structural solutions.

1 Design slides you can navigate in two seconds

Most board slide decks carry three bullet points per slide, a chart, a footnote, and a sub-heading. When the CFO asks you to go back to a specific slide, you have to scan the content to confirm you are in the right place. That scan takes four or five seconds while the room waits.

A slide with one claim at the top and one visual underneath takes two seconds to identify. You know instantly whether it is the right one, because the title is the entire message. You do not need to read the body copy at all.

The practical rule: write your slide title as a complete sentence that contains the finding. "Revenue grew 12% in Q1" rather than "Q1 Revenue." "Three contracts at risk in H2" rather than "Risk register." When the title is the finding, you can move through the deck by titles alone under pressure. The body copy is context, not content you need to recall live.

This is already what presentation coaches recommend for boards. The UK Government Communication Service slide guidelines state each slide should carry a single, clear message (GCS, 2023). Microsoft's accessibility guidance for business presentations recommends limiting text density and using a minimum 24pt body font (Microsoft, 2024). The dyslexia-optimised slide design is, in most cases, the better board slide design. You can introduce it without any reference to your own processing needs.

Build the deck this way and the "go back to the revenue slide" problem disappears. You are scanning titles, not content. The pressure drops significantly.

Fix the slides before anything else on this list. Everything else depends on having a presentation you can navigate by title alone in two seconds.

2 Write speaker notes as full sentences

Bullet-point speaker notes require reconstruction under pressure. You read "revenue growth" and "Q1 strong" and your working memory has to assemble them into something coherent while you are maintaining eye contact with twelve people and listening for the next question.

Full sentences do not require reconstruction. "Revenue grew 12% in Q1, which puts us four percentage points ahead of the same period last year and three points above our forecast." You can read that aloud if you need to. You almost certainly won't need to. But knowing it's there reduces the cognitive load in a way that bullet notes don't.

Write each section of notes as a short paragraph: two or three sentences, organised by slide group rather than by individual slide. One paragraph for the opening, one for the financial section, one for the strategic update. This matches how you will actually use the notes in the room, which is by topic rather than by individual slide number.

Add a short anticipated Q&A block at the end of your notes. Four or five likely questions, each answered in a complete sentence. "If asked about the H2 pipeline: the current pipeline shows 23 active opportunities, of which 8 are at final proposal stage." When the question arrives, the sentence already exists. You are not constructing it live.

Voice-to-text tools make drafting speaker notes considerably faster. Dragon Professional is Access to Work-fundable; the Access to Work calculator shows what you could claim for assistive technology in your role. Windows Speech Recognition is free and works adequately for this task. Draft by speaking, clean up in writing, print a copy to have in front of you.

Write the notes as sentences. The version you never need is better protection than the version you cannot use when you do need it.

3 Brief the chair for ten minutes before you walk in

Ask for ten minutes with the chair before the meeting. Walk them through your three key points and the one question you are most likely to face. This is already standard practice in well-run boards: chairs routinely meet with presenters beforehand to understand their intent and to flag likely questions from other directors.

What the pre-brief does for you specifically: the chair already knows your structure. When Q&A gets complicated or someone takes the discussion in an unexpected direction, a chair who understands your presentation can redirect the room, clarify a point on your behalf, or give you space to respond at your own pace. A chair encountering your content for the first time in the room can't do any of that.

The second benefit is less obvious but worth noting. You have said the words aloud once before you say them to the room. Verbal retrieval works differently after a single spoken rehearsal. The pre-brief functions as a warm-up that activates the material in a way that silent review of your notes does not.

You can frame the request without any disclosure: "I find it useful to walk you through my key points so you can direct questions efficiently." That is true and specific and gives the chair useful information. If you do want the pre-brief documented as a formal reasonable adjustment, that conversation is with HR rather than with the chair.

If you have not yet told your employer about your dyslexia and you are working out whether to, the disclosure guide covers the timing and the practical approach at senior levels.

Ten minutes before the meeting is a small ask. A chair who already knows your structure is real protection inside the room.

4 Own the Q&A format

You decide how the presentation runs. That includes when questions happen.

State the format in your opening line: "I will take questions at the end so we can cover each section without interruption." This is a well-regarded presentation management choice. Plenty of non-dyslexic board presenters use it for exactly the same reason any good presenter uses it: because mid-slide questions fragment the narrative and slow the discussion down. Nobody reads it as a concession or a special arrangement.

When someone raises a question mid-slide anyway, you have a clean response: "Good point. I will make sure we cover that in Q&A." Note it visibly on a pad in front of you. When Q&A opens, you have a written list of questions to work through in sequence. The visible list is a practical aid and signals to the room that you are managing the discussion systematically.

If your board runs a format where mid-slide questions are customary and changing that isn't realistic, a workable alternative is to ask a PA or trusted colleague to track questions in writing as they arise. They hand you the list when Q&A opens. You are not reconstructing what was asked from memory. You are reading from a list you can see.

Access to Work can fund a support worker for exactly this kind of role: someone whose job in the meeting is documentation, not content contribution. The reasonable adjustments builder drafts the formal request if you want this as a documented arrangement rather than an informal one.

Q&A at the end removes the hardest part of the live presentation problem. You can introduce it in one sentence before you start, with no explanation required.

The call

Fix the slides first. Before your next board presentation, go through every slide and test the title: does it state the finding, or does it label the topic? "Revenue grew 12% in Q1" or "Revenue"? Change every title until it is a finding. Then check whether you can scan the whole deck by titles alone, without reading the body copy. If you can, the slide structure is working.

Write the speaker notes after the slides are right, not before. If the slides work, you will need the notes far less than you expect. Draft by speaking, not typing. Ten minutes of voice-to-text, ten minutes of editing.

Ask for the pre-brief. One email to the chair's assistant: "Could I have ten minutes with [name] before the meeting to walk through my key points?" Most chairs say yes immediately.

Set the Q&A format in your opening sentence. State it, do not ask for it. "I will take questions at the end" is not a request for special consideration. It is how you are running your presentation.

The Equality Act 2010 requires your employer to consider all four of these as formal reasonable adjustments once they know about your dyslexia. The reasonable adjustments builder generates the request based on your role and the specific challenges you describe. But you can implement every one of them at your next board presentation without any disclosure. They are good presentation practice whether or not anyone in the room knows why you chose them.