Language — The Final Frontier for Accessibility
When we talk about disability and language, discussion is often limited to considering which terms and phrases are used to describe disability. It is a challenging area, with strong opinions, and there is no single correct answer. Depending on the location, the history and the language preferred terminology varies, I have learned that I cannot please all the disabled people, all the time. Although I can listen and try.
There is another aspect of language that developers and distributors, innovators and entrepreneurs can consider, to make their communications and information not only accessible but also understandable to those with a disability. Getting buy in to your new product or service, and increasing the likelihood of success, may depend on a spectrum of users who understand the benefits of your design and how to use it.
Starting out
A good starting point in writing for such an audience is to apply plain English guidelines. These suggest that you should
· Keep your sentences short
· Prefer active verbs
· Use ‘you’ and ‘we’
· Use words that are appropriate for the reader
· Don’t be afraid to give instructions
· Avoid nominalisations
· Use lists where appropriate
This is a good starting point, but you can go still further to assist those with learning or intellectual disabilities by using Easy Reading principles. Easy reading suggests the following rules:
Words and pictures
Rule 1: Each idea needs both words and pictures — both pictures and words are important.
Rule 2: Pictures and words go next to each other — this helps more people to understand the information.
Rule 3: Make sure that it is clear which pictures support which bits of text.
Pictures
Rule 4: Pictures must be easy to understand.
Rule 5: Pictures should go on the left.
Rule 6: Pictures can be drawings, photographs or other images.
Rule 7: Make sure that pictures are as big as possible.
Words
Rule 8: Words must be easy to understand.
Rule 9: If you use complicated words, say what they mean using easy words.
Rule 10: Words go on the right.
Rule 11: Words must be written clearly — a font like Arial is good.
Rule 12: Words must be big –font size of at least 14 point is good.
Length
Rule 13: Each sentence must be as short as possible — more than 15 words are harder to read. Rule 14: Each document must be short — more than 20 pages is too long.
Whilst these principles and guidelines are designed for English and Latin languages that are read from left to right, they can be customised for other languages. As long as we pay due regard to culture and preferences in those communities.
Future development
As I draft this article, I am using Grammarly to help me write clearly. In the future, the need to write in ways that contradict our natural style may be addressed through technology. Content clarification is an area of artificial intelligence with the capability to simplify complex language to be more easily understandable to others. At a basic level, it is already widely used as automated text and sentiment analysis for marketing purposes
Text analysis uses machine learning to allow companies to automatically extract and classify text, such as tweets, emails, support tickets, product reviews, and survey responses. Text analysis applications enable companies to extract specific information, such as keywords, names, or company information from those sources and to curate survey responses by sentiment and topic.
Increasingly the tools will become more powerful, summarising text for ease of reading. Once clarified, the content will then in a much better condition for conversion to alternative formats, Braille, speech or augmented with graphics and readily translated into other languages. Until then, language remains a barrier to making a product available to the broadest audience, applying the principles of plain English and easy reading will help bridge that gap
Footnote
If you are looking for free and open licenced symbols to add to your text for easy reading, you will find a vast range of graphics at globalsymbols.com
