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Fonts, colors, screen readers?
I am currently teaching a teenager, it is obvious he understands principles fast and has great memory retention, but syntax is a bit of a problem. We obviously use helpful editors and IDEs in this regard, but it is still an issue.
Every training I had to overcome my dyslexia was absolutely useless. Spellcheck is very important. Fonts and colors don't matter at all. Just seeing my own work after I forgot about it, actually makes me see my mistakes. This can take years, my memory is insane for my own work.
You can't see mistakes, since you basically have an internal autocompletion that doesn't allow you to see mistakes or missing words. Checking the code of my coworkers is surprisingly different, I can find their mistakes quite easily.
It is much more important to have goal and motivation. Don't worry about those little details, like floating letters and missing words.
I think it might be helpful if you could say specifically what are they having issues with. what is triggering things and where.
As for fonts/colors/etc.. I always use mono spaced fonts, and ones that make clear distinctions between all characters (0/O) (I/l) etc...
I use dark themes but I don't think that helps with the issue, and is just a personal preference. I can't imagine using a screen reader and it not being horrible, code is far to many characters with specific meaning, for a reader to read them out would be minding numbing.
They didn't have much trouble with code, but reading specs was a pain.
I learned shorter sentences and more whitespace between them helped.
And, of course, brevity.
I always have to triple check numbers, I often try grouping them in a few different ways, e.g. 327895 I would read as 32-78-95 and then again as 327-895 just to be sure I have not transposed any digits.
Other than this sort of discipline I have not found a solution.
As others have mentioned, it’s all about motivation. The longest books I read as a kid were programming books - I got through them because I was motivated to learn. I’d recommend challenging him with puzzles - find something level appropriate such “print a pyramid with base size n” or “draw a maze that doesn’t loop back on itself” for advanced beginners.
ALWAYS ALWAYS close your parenthesis/brackets/quotes as soon as you open them then go back to write what's in them. So, if I write: func(arg), the keystrokes for me are: f u n c ( ) Color syntax highlighting is a must! It lets you know your keywords are correct.
Copy-and-paste variable names. Write them once and then get fast at copying them.
And then some preferences I like, not sure if they're related:
I prefer coding styles with lots of vertical white-space. I also rotate my monitors to portrait.
Also, I've always used a dark mode theme. I thought that was a nostalgia for the old DOS days, but seeing other people recommend them, maybe it's a thing?
The best trick I have found is having my work, and code read back to me using text to speech software.
Reading along as the computer speaks helps me to find spelling and grammar mistakes.
There is a couple of fonts aimed to help dyslexics. [0] https://github.com/antijingoist/opendyslexic