One dyslexia-friendly worksheet for the whole class: why it is not enough

You have three pupils on SEN support in your class. You take tomorrow's maths worksheet, switch to a dyslexia-friendly font, make it bigger, space it out, and photocopy that version for all three. That is already a lot of work, and a genuine step towards inclusion.

Yet the next day, only one of the three does better. The second shows no change. The third finds it harder than with the original sheet.

It is not that the adaptation was badly done. It is that these three children's needs pull in different directions.

What helps Léo can get in his neighbour's way

We often talk about children with dyslexia, dyspraxia or ADHD as one group. On an actual worksheet, their needs sometimes contradict each other. Take a perfectly ordinary Year 3 maths sheet.

Strip the page back, or add support?

• Léo is easily distracted. What helps him: an almost empty page. One exercise at a time, no decorative pictures, nothing in the margins.
• Inès reads slowly and mixes up sounds. What can help her: syllables in alternating colours, a reminder of the rule in a box, a worked example at the top of the page.

For Inès, these additions are support. For Léo, each of them draws the eye away from the question. One sheet cannot be both stripped back and enriched.

Write less, or have more room to write?

• For a child who finds handwriting very tiring, you cut down the writing: tick, circle, match, fill in a word rather than a sentence.
• For a child who struggles to organise their page or to write in a small space, the problem is not writing, it is room: large answer areas, taller lines, no answers squeezed between two words.

See everything at once, or one step at a time?

• A child who loses track in long instructions benefits from instructions broken into numbered steps, one action per line.
• A child who needs to see the whole picture to feel secure can, on the contrary, be thrown by an exercise chopped into small pieces whose purpose they cannot see.

The same font for everyone?

Even the font, often presented as the dyslexia adjustment, is not universal. Some children read better with a very open font such as Andika or Luciole, others see no difference, and some do not like OpenDyslexic at all. Size, line spacing and letter spacing often matter as much as the font itself, and the right setting varies from one child to the next.

A single "dyslexia-friendly" version is a compromise. It helps everyone a little, a few a lot, and sometimes gets in the way of those who needed it most.

A diagnosis does not describe a need

There is a simple reason for all this: a diagnosis does not tell you what to change on the page.

• Two dyslexic children do not necessarily have the same needs. One stumbles over decoding; the other reads accurately but very slowly and runs out of steam after ten lines.
• The same child often has more than one difficulty. The collective review by Inserm, France's national health research institute, notes that learning difficulties often occur together, and that an attention difficulty goes with a reading difficulty in about a quarter of cases. Researchers consider this overlap the rule rather than the exception.
• Many pupils have no diagnosis at all, or have been waiting for an assessment for months, and yet have needs you can see in class.

That is why it is more useful to start from what you observe ("loses their place when reading", "gives up in front of a dense text", "lines up digits badly in column sums") than from the label. Our practical guide goes through fifteen difficulties and the adaptations that go with them.

The real obstacle: time

No teacher disputes that, ideally, each pupil would have their own version. The problem lies elsewhere: making three versions of the same sheet, by hand, for tomorrow morning, is one more hour on a weeknight. Multiplied by the number of worksheets, it is unsustainable.

Hence the one-version compromise. It does not come from a lack of goodwill, but from a lack of time.

Adapting every sheet for every child, in one go

That is where DysAdapt starts. Each child has a profile that describes their needs, not their diagnosis: what gets in their way on a page, the font, size and spacing that suit them. You take a photo of the original sheet, and DysAdapt produces each child's version from their profile.

Léo gets his stripped-back page. Inès gets her coloured syllables and her worked example. The content of the exercise stays the same for everyone: only the presentation changes.