An Empirical Investigation of the Experiences of Dyslexic Software Engineers

2025-11-01

AI Summary

This study addresses the gap in understanding how dyslexia affects professional software engineering practice. Using a socio-technical grounded theory approach, we systematically analyzed data from 10 in-depth interviews with dyslexic software engineers, 3 expert blog posts, and 153 Reddit discussions to explore their post-learning-phase programming experiences. Our findings provide the first empirical evidence that dyslexic engineers exhibit pronounced strengths in visual-spatial reasoning and creative problem solving. Furthermore, we identify that assistive tools—particularly AI-powered code completion and static analysis (linting) tools—effectively mitigate literacy-related challenges, enabling affected individuals to perform competently—and often excel—in core development tasks. The study yields empirically grounded insights and actionable design implications for fostering inclusive software development environments, advancing both accessibility research and human-centered tool design in software engineering.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: AI for Accessibility
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Diagnosis and Abductive Reasoning
• Natural Language Processing: Code Generation / Program Synthesis from Natural Language

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Research challenges in human and human-AI computation
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Vertical and domain-specific search

Abstract

Dyslexia is a common learning disorder that primarily impairs an individual's reading and writing abilities. In adults, dyslexia can affect both professional and personal lives, often leading to mental challenges and difficulties acquiring and keeping work. In Software Engineering (SE), reading and writing difficulties appear to pose substantial challenges for core tasks such as programming. However, initial studies indicate that these challenges may not significantly affect their performance compared to non-dyslexic colleagues. Conversely, strengths associated with dyslexia could be particularly valuable in areas like programming and design. However, there is currently no work that explores the experiences of dyslexic software engineers, and puts their strengths into relation with their difficulties. To address this, we present a qualitative study of the experiences of dyslexic individuals in SE. We followed the basic stage of the Socio-Technical Grounded Theory method and base our findings on data collected through 10 interviews with dyslexic software engineers, 3 blog posts and 153 posts on the social media platform Reddit. We find that dyslexic software engineers especially struggle at the programming learning stage, but can succeed and indeed excel at many SE tasks once they master this step. Common SE-specific support tools, such as code completion and linters are especially useful to these individuals and mitigate many of the experienced difficulties. Finally, dyslexic software engineers exhibit strengths in areas such as visual thinking and creativity. Our findings have implications to SE practice and motivate several areas of future research in SE, such as investigating what makes code less/more understandable to dyslexic individuals.

Problem

• Investigating experiences of dyslexic software engineers in professional practice
• Exploring how dyslexia affects programming learning and SE task performance
• Identifying strengths and support tools for dyslexic software engineers

Innovation

• Qualitative study using socio-technical grounded theory
• Data collected from interviews and online posts
• Identifies strengths in visual thinking and creativity