Start with the thing most lists get wrong.
Dyslexia fonts do not have good evidence behind them. OpenDyslexic and Dyslexie are designed around the idea that weighted letter bottoms prevent letters flipping. Wery and Diliberto tested OpenDyslexic against Arial and Times New Roman in an alternating-treatment study and found no improvement in reading rate or accuracy, for individual students or the group. None of the participants preferred it. Rello and Baeza-Yates, testing a wider set of typefaces with dyslexic readers, found that ordinary fonts such as Helvetica, Courier, Arial and Verdana performed best, and advised against italics.
What did help in that work was spacing. Increased character spacing improved reading performance. So the setting worth looking for in a notes app is letter and line spacing control, not a special font.
If a dyslexia font feels better to you, use it. Preference is a real reason. Just do not choose an app because it ships one, and do not let it substitute for the features below.
What actually helps
Text-to-speech. The single most useful feature. Listening bypasses decoding entirely, and Bonifacci's work found text-to-speech reduced mind wandering during reading in students with dyslexia, which points at why it helps: decoding effort consumes the attention that comprehension needs. Look for TTS that reads your own notes, not just imported documents.
Dictation, done well. Writing is often the harder half. Good on-device dictation turns a five minute struggle into a thirty second one, and it removes spelling from the capture step entirely.
Spelling that tolerates phonetic attempts. Standard spellcheck frequently fails on dyslexic spellings because it assumes you got the first letters right. Systems that handle phonetic guesses are meaningfully better.
Search that survives misspelling. If you have to spell a word correctly to find your own note, search is broken for you. Fuzzy or semantic search matters much more here than it does for most users. See how to search your notes.
Adjustable spacing, size and background. Line spacing, character spacing, larger text, and an off-white or tinted background. Cheap to offer, genuinely useful, and surprisingly rare.
Handwriting and drawing. Structure without sentences. Diagrams, arrows and spatial layout carry meaning that does not require spelling anything, which is part of why concept mapping and sketchnoting suit a lot of dyslexic thinkers better than linear prose.
The apps
| App | Why | Watch out |
|---|---|---|
| OneNote | Immersive Reader is the strongest accessibility feature in any notes app: read-aloud with word highlighting, adjustable spacing, syllable splitting, parts of speech | Interface is busy |
| Apple Notes | System-wide Speak Screen, strong dictation, handwriting, scan-and-read, free | Fewer typography controls |
| Google Keep | Fast voice notes that transcribe automatically, works with Android accessibility | Weak for long notes |
| Evernote | Search inside images and handwriting, good web clipper | Free tier is limited |
| Notability / Goodnotes | Record audio synced to what you wrote, so you can jump back to what was said | Paid, iPad-centric |
If you want one recommendation: OneNote. Immersive Reader is not a checkbox feature, it is a properly built reading tool, and OneNote is free and runs nearly everywhere. Nothing else in this category comes close on that specific axis.
If you are on Apple devices, Apple Notes plus the system accessibility settings gets most of the way there, and Speak Screen works across every app rather than one.
For lectures, an app that records audio alongside notes changes the situation more than any font setting. You write three words, and the audio at that timestamp fills in the rest, so you are not trying to decode and transcribe simultaneously. See how to take lecture notes.
Habits that matter more than the app
Capture by voice, review by text. Separate the two. Getting it down should never be gated on spelling.
Keep notes short and separated. One idea per note beats long documents, because a wall of text is where decoding effort compounds. This is atomic notes arrived at for a different reason.
Use structure aggressively. Headings, bullets, whitespace. Visual structure carries meaning that dense prose hides, and it reduces how much rereading is needed to find your place. See the outline method.
Record when it matters. For anything consequential, a recording removes the pressure to capture completely in real time. Check the rules where you are and tell people, as set out in how to take notes with AI.
Do not fight the spelling in the moment. Get the idea down wrong, fix it later or not at all. A note only you read does not need to be correct, and stopping to fix a word is where the thought gets lost.
One caveat on AI: it is genuinely useful here for cleaning up dictated text and for searching notes you cannot spell. It is not a good substitute for writing the note yourself, because the encoding benefit described in the generation effect comes from producing the words. Use it on the mechanics, not on the thinking.
The short version
Choose for text-to-speech, dictation, forgiving search, audio recording and spacing controls. Ignore the font.
More in note-taking for ADHD, the best voice notes app, the best notes app for students, and how to take better notes.