My DC2 has a learning disability and from my observations, I didn't think she was at all ready for reading when she was young. She didn't have much phonic awareness, didn't recognise rhyming words, didn't remember which symbol was which on the washing machine, couldn't remember a sequence of several things, and so on. Besides, she had a very short attention span and no interest in reading. Luckily, she was immune to other people's expectations. She wasn't too aware of what anyone else was doing at particular ages and had no desire to conform. The fact she wasn't in a classroom with kids all her own age meant she was blithely unaware that she was far "behind" by academic standards.
So I just read to her (she would usually only tolerate a few nursery rhymes or other short poems), let her see me and her sibling reading, tried playing I Spy and doing pattern matching with her, and waited for her to be ready. I also laid the expectation for it by mentioning to her from time to time that just about everyone is able to learn to read and does so eventually, that it's a very useful life skill, that it happens at different ages, that people use different methods, and that some people have to work quite hard at it while others find it easy, so it might take several years of focused work to get the hang of it. When she was about ten she showed signs of being able to manage the job of learning to read, if she wanted to... which she didn't. :-D She did recognise a number of individual words but she didn't want to go farther with it.
Then during the Covid lockdowns she spent a lot of time communicating with friends and relatives through various messaging apps. I read their messages to her and helped her by typing in whatever she wanted to say. But sometimes I was too busy, and her impatience prompted her to use speech-to-text. I think this was instrumental in her learning to read and write. I often observed her having to choose between several options the app was offering her, or trying to spell words phonetically and seeing what autocorrect made of her attempts.
However, the process by which she learned to read will always be something of a mystery to me. She's one of those secretive learners who doesn't really want to share what she is thinking, and definitely doesn't want to be quizzed about what she knows and what she can do!
She still can't manage walls of text, or grasp complex sentences. However, that's in line with her overall abilities; she doesn't understand if I read it aloud to her either. But I'd describe her as functionally literate, and that is a win. Her spelling continues to come on in leaps and bounds. She's 18 and still learning!