I was listening to a radio programme recently, in which a well-known writer said she was dyslexic, and for her the best word-processor she'd found was an old version of WordPerfect.  In particular, the white-on-blue colouring, and the absence of those squiggly underlines that Word gives you, made it much easier to read what was on the screen.  I'm no expert, but I believe that different dyslexic people might find different colour combinations easier to read.

That got me thinking about how one might set up Word 2007 to better help dyslexic people to read documents.  There are some things you can do, but I must say it's not perfect by any means.  In fairness to Microsoft, there could well be other features that I haven't found to make things better.

The Print Layout, Full Screen Reading, and Web Layout views are all wysiwyg, which is a slight problem when trying to set up colours.  On the Page Layout tab you can click Page Color to choose a background colour for your page, and by default Word won't attempt to actually print that background colour when you print your document.  You can choose a pale yellow background for example, which might help some people.  Unfortunately I don't think you can achieve the white-on-blue of an old WordPerfect, because your white text will be printed in white on white paper.  Still, if printing isn't an issue for you, that could be ok - set the text colour on the Home tab in the normal way.  Here's my "black on yellow"...

Once you find a colour combination you like, you can edit the built-in Blank Document Template so that all new documents you create follow the same colouring.

The Outline and Draft views are not exactly wysiwyg, but will still try to preserve the colouring you choose in any printed documents, so I don't think they're any more useful than the other views here.

The other problematic feature for dyslexia sufferers is the squiggly underlining that Word gives you for spelling and grammar errors.  These can easily be turned off.  Choose Word Options from the Office menu, then under the Proofing tab find "Check spelling as you type" and "Mark grammar errors as you type".  Simply un-tick the boxes and Word will stop adding the squigglies.  Here's an example...

That's all I could find.  If anyone has any other good advice email me and I'll update this post.