Try the calculator with a typical day. Say 30 minutes re-reading emails. Add 20 minutes proofreading, and 15 minutes prepping for meetings.
Add 20 minutes re-reading documents, 10 minutes avoiding tasks, and 20 minutes recovering from fatigue. That's 115 minutes a day. It returns 59 lost working days a year.
This is the calculator's whole job. It turns workaround time into hours, days and pounds. Once you see the number, it stops looking like just how you work.
What masking actually costs
Masking is the effort you put in to hide the workaround. It's re-reading an email a third time so a typo doesn't slip through. It's staying twenty minutes late to check a report nobody asked you to check.
None of that shows up on a timesheet. Colleagues see the finished email. They don't see the three drafts before it, so the extra hours stay invisible.
The masking cost calculator exists for that reason. Invisible costs are easy to dismiss. A number on a page is not.
If you've never timed your workarounds, the total is almost always higher than you'd guess. That gap is what the calculator closes.
How the calculator works
You enter two things first: your salary and your working hours. Then you move six sliders, one for each common workaround.
The six are email re-reading, proofreading, meeting prep, document re-reading, task avoidance, and fatigue recovery. Each slider runs from 0 to 120 minutes a day.
The defaults are set to typical figures. But your own honest answer is always more useful than the default.
The calculator multiplies your daily minutes by your hourly rate. Then it multiplies that by 228 working days a year. That's the standard UK working year after weekends, leave and bank holidays.
It hands back three numbers: hours lost per day, working days lost per year, and money lost per year.
Be honest rather than exact with the sliders. A rough number that matches your real week beats a precise one that doesn't.
A worked example
Take a £32,000 salary and a standard 37-hour week. Use the default workaround settings. The calculator returns 1.9 hours a day lost to workarounds.
That's 26% of the working day. It works out to 59 full working days a year. That's more than eleven weeks.
Annual cost at a £32,000 salary with default workaround settings (dyslexia.vision masking cost calculator worked example, July 2026).
That's time spent on tasks colleagues without dyslexia don't have to do. At a higher salary, the pounds figure climbs. The days-lost figure stays about the same, because it tracks time, not pay.
Run the calculator with your own salary and your own honest numbers. The example above is a starting point, not a prediction.
What to do with the number
A number this size is a business case. It's not just a personal frustration. Text-to-speech software, extra review time, or a note-taker usually cost far less than the workaround time already costs.
In the UK, Access to Work can fund assistive technology and support. Your employer pays nothing. The Access to Work calculator estimates what that might be worth for you.
In the US, the ADA requires reasonable accommodations at no cost to you. The ADA accommodations guide covers how that process works.
Whichever country you're in, the next step is the same. Turn the number into a specific request, not a general complaint.
The six categories, and why they're there
| Workaround | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Email re-reading | Checking a message more than once before sending |
| Proofreading | Extra spelling and grammar checks beyond a normal pass |
| Meeting prep | Over-preparing to avoid stumbling in front of others |
| Document re-reading | Reading instructions or reports more than once to be sure |
| Task avoidance | Delaying or delegating tasks that feel harder than they should |
| Fatigue recovery | Time spent recovering after sustained reading or writing |
Each category was chosen because it's common, not because it's dramatic. Most dyslexic employees recognise at least four of the six straight away.
If one category is much higher than the rest, that's often the best place to start when you ask for support.
Who this tool is for
It's built for anyone who suspects their workarounds add up to more than they've admitted. You don't need a diagnosis to use it. You just need an honest guess at your own day.
It's also useful before a disclosure conversation. A number gives you something concrete to open with. That beats a vague sense that things are harder than they should be.
Run it once now, out of curiosity. Run it again after any change to your workload, to see if the picture has shifted.
What this means for you
If your result lands above roughly 60 minutes a day, the maths points one way. Ask for adjustments now, rather than absorbing the cost for another year.
Below that, even small changes help. A proofreading tool, or written rather than verbal instructions, can recover most of the time.
Either way, the reasonable adjustments email builder turns your specific challenges into a plan and a draft email. It takes about two minutes, and it's the natural next step once you have your number.
A number you can point to changes the conversation. It moves you from "I'm struggling" to "here's what this costs, and here's what would fix it."