Does touch typing help dyslexia?

Touch typing helps with typing speed and comfort. It does not treat dyslexia, and it should not be expected to make reading or spelling easier. Dyslexia is defined by difficulty with word-level reading and spelling, which a 2018 review says are caused by phonological deficits ¹. Touch typing changes how your fingers reach the keys, not how you process the sounds in words. For the wider picture, see our guide to speech to text for dyslexia and dysgraphia, part of our accessibility and health guides.

Touch typing speeds up typing, but it does not change the reading problem

Touch typing means you type without looking at the keys, with each finger assigned to its own keys and returning to a home position in the middle row. The benefit is that your eyes can stay on the screen and your hands need not search. That helps a writer who types for long periods, and it helps a writer whose typing is slow because of searching.

It does not help with the sound-based work that dyslexia affects. Spelling a word correctly still depends on knowing how the word sounds and how its letters map to those sounds. A faster hand does not supply that knowledge, so the errors that come from spelling are likely to remain.

The one study with learning disabilities found lasting speed gains

The study that comes closest to your question is a 2015 study of higher education students. It ran a structured touch-typing program, with software that logged the time and accuracy of each key. The sample included 44 students with developmental learning disabilities, and 30 students without them ².

Students in the program kept accuracy above 95 percent ³. At a three-month follow-up, both groups were significantly faster than before the program ⁴. The students with learning disabilities somewhat improved, while the typically achieving students got slower at the end of the program ⁵. That last result is a reminder that the study measured typing, not reading or spelling.

The study has three limits that matter for you:

• It is not about dyslexia alone. The abstract we checked groups students under developmental learning disabilities, and does not separate dyslexia from other conditions.
• It has no control group. Because nobody was left out of the program, the improvement cannot be credited to the lessons alone.
• The sample is older students in higher education. Results may not carry over to school-age children or to adults in work.

Touch typing takes hundreds of hours, and typing without it can still be fast

Touch typing can be learned rather quickly, but the authors of a 2016 paper write that it requires deliberate training of hundreds of hours ⁶. Plan for a long practice period, not a single course.

Non-touch typing is not always slow. The researchers of a Vanderbilt study concluded that nonstandard typists could type almost as quickly and accurately as touch typists, provided they could see the keyboard ⁷. The study did not test people with dyslexia, but it shows that the speed gap is not always large.

Training also does not always last. Earlier research found that success in touch-typing training does not guarantee that people keep touch typing in everyday use ⁸. Practice on the keys you use each day may be a better way to keep the skill, though we found no study that tests this.

It depends on what is slowing you down

Touch typing is worth trying when the keyboard itself is the bottleneck, such as when typing is slow, tiring or error-prone for reasons unrelated to spelling. It is less likely to help when the main difficulty is finding the right word or spelling it, because the keyboard is not the source of those problems.

If you find it hard to get ideas onto the page, dictation addresses that directly. Our question on speech to text versus text to speech compares the two tools for reading and writing. If reading is the main difficulty, touch typing will not change that, and the question on dysgraphia and dyslexia explains how the two differ.

What to do

1. Name the problem. Decide whether typing speed, spelling, reading or composing is slowing you down.
2. If typing speed is the problem, practice little and often. Short daily sessions are a sensible plan, though we found no study that compares them with longer sessions. Our question on how long touch typing takes to learn explains what to expect.
3. Use dictation for drafts. Speech to text removes the keyboard from composing. Check each short passage by reading it back, as our question on proofreading dictated text describes.
4. Ask for an assessment. A school or clinician can test reading, spelling and writing separately. A single test of typing speed will not show whether dyslexia is involved.

For more on touch typing itself, see touch typing versus hunt and peck.