Being a dyslexic chef: 4 high-stakes tasks and what works

As many as 1 in 2 people working in UK hospitality may be neurodivergent. That’s well above the 15 to 20% figure for the UK overall (Burnt Chef Project, March 2024). Kitchens run on reading fast, under constant pressure.

Recipes, tickets, labels, and supplier forms: reading is the job behind the job. Four of those tasks carry the highest risk for a dyslexic chef. Each one has a fix you can make without telling the whole kitchen.

Reading recipes and prep lists at speed

Recipe cards and prep sheets cram numbers, timings, and steps into small type. Many are laminated sheets nobody has updated in years. Dyslexia makes it easier to skip a step under pressure, not because you don’t know the dish.

The eye skips a line, or repeats one, and a step gets missed. A missed step or a wrong quantity can mean binned stock. Or a plate that doesn’t match the one before it.

The fix: turn written recipes into a checklist, one photo per dish. One action per line, with amounts in the same place every time. Read a new recipe aloud with text-to-speech before service, not mid-shift under pressure.

Use icons where you can: a knife for chop, a flame for heat, a clock for timing. High-contrast print, not tiny grey text on white, cuts errors further.

Our guide to text-to-speech tools covers options that work from a phone camera. That matters more on a line than a desktop tool ever will.

Batch-cooking templates help more than home-cook recipe apps. A section’s mise en place repeats week after week. Build the template once per dish, and you solve the problem once, not every shift.

Reformat a wall-of-text prep sheet once, and you stop re-reading it under pressure every shift.

Allergen labels: the one you cannot get wrong

Natasha’s Law covers any food packed for direct sale, like sandwiches or pre-boxed salads. It requires a full ingredient and allergen list on the label, in force since October 2021. Get the label wrong, and the fine is unlimited under the Food Safety Act 1990.

That fine falls on the business, not the individual who wrote the label. Free-hand labelling is where dyslexia creates the most risk. Copying an allergen list by hand invites swapped digits and missed items.

Dropdown-based labelling software removes the free-hand step entirely. You select ingredients from a fixed list instead of typing them. A second-person check before a label leaves the kitchen catches what a first read misses.

Allergen labels aren’t the only paperwork like this in a kitchen. Food safety diaries need hourly temperature checks and cleaning logs, on the same handwritten sheets for years. That’s the FSA’s Safer Food Better Business scheme, and the same fix works: dropdown fields beat a blank grid.

Raise this formally rather than working around it alone. The reasonable adjustments builder turns a specific kitchen problem like this into a short written request. Hand it to a head chef or manager in minutes.

If your kitchen still hand-writes allergen labels, ask for label software as a reasonable adjustment. It protects the business as much as it protects you.

Reading supplier order forms and stock counts

Supplier orders and stock sheets are number-heavy, often handwritten or phoned in under time pressure. Digit reversal, where 32 boxes becomes 23, is a common dyslexia-linked error. So is a product code read backward.

The fix: standardise a single order template. Product code in one column, quantity in another, never mixed in a sentence. Read every order back before it’s sent, to a supplier rep or a manager checking an email.

Photographing a handwritten count sheet and sending the image skips a whole transcription step.

A five-second read-back before you hit send catches the error before it becomes a wrong delivery.

Reading the pass during service

Tickets during service are read fast, often abbreviated, sometimes handwritten, always under noise and time pressure. Misreading a ticket doesn’t just mean a wrong dish. If an allergy modifier gets missed, it’s a safety incident, not an inconvenience.

A Bluetooth earpiece linked to the ordering system reads tickets aloud instead of only showing them on screen. A tribunal has already confirmed this exact fix as reasonable (Moore v Greene King, tribunal heard September 2025).

A call-and-response habit helps too: repeat the order and any allergy flag back to the pass before you start it. That catches errors before food moves.

Larger POS screen fonts and colour-coded allergy flags are free settings changes. Most kitchen systems already support them.

Access to Work can fund a Bluetooth earpiece and label software in full for new starters. That applies for anyone under six weeks into a role. After that, it’s shared-cost based on employer size (DWP Access to Work guidance, 2026).

The Access to Work calculator gives a quick estimate before you apply.

A worked example

The chef in the Greene King case suggested the earpiece fix himself, before he was dismissed. The tribunal found the business had it available, knew about his dyslexia, and refused anyway. It awarded him £24,005.63 for that refusal (Moore v Greene King, tribunal heard September 2025).

Check whether Access to Work covers hardware like an earpiece before you assume it doesn’t. The calculator answers that faster than a phone call to DWP.

What this means for you

None of these four fixes require telling the whole kitchen you’re dyslexic. A reformatted prep sheet, label software, an order template, and an earpiece all look like normal kitchen efficiency. Not disclosure.

The clearest evidence these adjustments hold up: a tribunal already ruled that refusing one is unlawful. That was after a dyslexic chef asked for it directly (Moore v Greene King, tribunal heard September 2025).

If you run a section, put the fix into its standard procedure. Not just in your own head. That way it survives you changing shifts or changing jobs.

You don’t need a diagnosis to ask for any of these fixes. The duty to make adjustments starts once your employer knows, or should reasonably know, about the difficulty (Equality Act 2010).

Start with whichever task carries the most legal or safety weight. For most sections, that’s allergen labelling. One mistake creates risk for the whole business, not just for you.

Pick the task from this list causing you the most stress this week, and ask for that fix first. You don’t need to solve all four at once.