Dyslexia Accommodation Menu: What to Request by Cognitive Deficit

Most accommodation lists for dyslexia are the same: extended time, text-to-speech, audiobooks. These are valid. They are also wildly incomplete.

Dyslexia does not cause one cognitive deficit — it produces a profile of weaknesses that varies significantly between students. A student whose primary challenge is slow processing speed needs different accommodations than a student whose working memory is severely impaired or one whose phonological awareness is profoundly delayed. An accommodation list that ignores this profile specificity does not reflect a student's actual needs.

What follows is a menu of accommodations organised by the specific cognitive deficits they address. Not every student needs every item — the goal is to match accommodation to deficit.

Accommodations for Slow Processing Speed

Processing speed is one of the most reliably depressed scores in dyslexia profiles. On the WISC-V, students with dyslexia frequently score significantly lower on the Processing Speed Index than on Verbal Comprehension, reflecting the neurological cost of slow grapheme-phoneme mapping.

Relevant accommodations:

• Extended time on tests — 1.5x time is the standard minimum; 2x time is appropriate for students with very low processing speed scores (at or below the 10th percentile)
• Chunked assignments — large writing tasks broken into timed segments with check-ins rather than a single deadline
• Reduced output requirements — demonstrate mastery through quality of response, not quantity; five well-reasoned sentences over ten rushed ones
• No timed reading fluency assessments used to evaluate comprehension — reading rate and reading comprehension are separate skills
• Extended deadlines for multi-stage projects — each stage gets its own deadline with teacher review

Accommodations for Phonological Processing Deficits

Phonological processing is the defining cognitive bottleneck of dyslexia. Phonemic awareness, phonological memory, and rapid automatised naming are all components. Accommodations here are designed to bypass the decoding bottleneck when demonstrating knowledge in content subjects — while structured literacy intervention simultaneously works to remediate the deficit itself.

Relevant accommodations:

• Text-to-speech software (e.g., Kurzweil 3000, NaturalReader, Voice Dream Reader) — converts any digital text to speech so the student accesses content at their cognitive level rather than their decoding level
• Audiobooks via Learning Ally or Bookshare — human-narrated versions of textbooks and literature
• Test questions read aloud — by a human reader or approved screen reader during assessments
• Phonetically-aware spell-check — standard spell-check misses the heavily phonetic misspellings typical of dyslexia; tools like Ghotit or advanced word prediction handle these better
• Separate quiet testing environment — reduces auditory distraction that adds to phonological processing load
• Pre-taught vocabulary — new vocabulary words provided in advance of a unit, with pronunciation guides and semantic context

Accommodations for Working Memory Deficits

Working memory impairment is the reason a dyslexic student can understand a math concept perfectly but lose track of the steps mid-calculation. It is also why multistep oral instructions fail to land, and why copying from the board while simultaneously processing what the teacher is saying is cognitively impossible.

Relevant accommodations:

• Graphic organizers and note-taking templates provided in advance — the student fills in frameworks rather than constructing them from scratch under cognitive load
• Access to teacher slides or notes before class — reduces the dual-task of transcribing and processing simultaneously
• Printed copies of verbal instructions — instructions that can be re-read rather than held in working memory
• Reduced steps on written directions — no more than two or three steps at a time
• Calculator access for all math tasks — decouples the reading and conceptual demands of a word problem from basic fact retrieval
• Strategic seating near the teacher — reduces the peripheral noise that taxes working memory in group settings
• Repetition of instructions without penalty — the student asks "can you repeat that?" without it being marked as inattention or misbehaviour

Accommodations for Written Expression

Dyslexia's impact on written output is profound. Between the cognitive load of decoding-to-spelling, the phonetic spelling errors that standard tools cannot catch, and frequent co-occurring dysgraphia, many dyslexic students produce written work that dramatically underrepresents their actual intellectual capacity.

Relevant accommodations:

• Speech-to-text dictation (e.g., Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Google Docs Voice Typing) — removes the encoding bottleneck and allows composition at the speed of thought
• Keyboarding instead of handwriting — for students with co-occurring dysgraphia
• Scribe — a human who transcribes dictated responses on assessments where technology is not permitted
• Spelling not counted in content-area assessments — the student is assessed on their knowledge of science or history, not their ability to spell the vocabulary words
• Sentence starters and writing frames — reduce the working memory demand of generating structure while also generating content
• Draft submission before final — provides a feedback checkpoint that accounts for the disproportionate effort required to produce written work

Accommodations for High-Stakes Testing (SAT/ACT/AP)

Securing standardised testing accommodations requires a separate application process with the College Board (for SAT and AP exams) or ACT Inc. Both organisations require documentation that is more stringent than a typical school IEP accommodation.

Required elements for College Board applications:

• A current psychoeducational evaluation (typically within the last three to five years) with standardised subtest scores
• Documentation of functional impact on test-taking
• Evidence that the accommodation reflects the student's Normal Way of Working at school

For SAT and ACT, 50% extended time is the most common accommodation for students with dyslexia and processing speed below the 16th percentile. Double time (100% extension) is approved for students with more severe impairment.

Denials are common, particularly for students whose reading comprehension scores are average due to cognitive compensation. A detailed clinician narrative explaining that average comprehension scores mask the profound processing speed and phonological deficits — and the unsustainable cognitive effort required to achieve those scores — is the most effective component of an appeal.

What Accommodations Cannot Do

Accommodations level the playing field. They do not teach reading. A student who receives only accommodations — extended time, text-to-speech, audiobooks — and no structured literacy intervention is not having their deficit addressed. They are bypassing it indefinitely.

This matters because the bypass becomes load-bearing. A student who reaches high school having only ever used audiobooks may have never developed any autonomous reading capacity. The IEP must contain both: intervention goals that actively build phonological processing and decoding skills, and accommodations that allow the student to access curriculum content while the remediation work is underway.

If your child's current IEP or 504 plan contains accommodations only, with no named reading intervention, that is the most important thing to address at the next meeting.

The Dyslexia Support & Reading Intervention Kit includes a complete accommodation bank categorised by deficit type, along with IEP goal templates for reading intervention and scripts for the meeting conversation when a school insists that accommodations alone are sufficient. The goal bank specifies intervention methodology, frequency, and group size — the specificity that schools routinely omit and that parents routinely fail to demand.