Glossary · Accessibility term
Easy read
Easy read is a document format made for people with learning disabilities. Simple text, free of jargon and cut back to the information that matters most, with clear images beside it to support the meaning. UK government guidance is blunt about what it is not, saying in one sentence that easy read is different from plain English. So it is a separate discipline rather than plain English turned up a notch. Europe treats it as a defined format too, with published standards called Information for all and an official logo a conforming document can carry. The part organisations get wrong is the scope. People with learning disabilities need access to all of your information, not only the parts that are about disability.
In practice
An easy read document is produced by rewriting, not by trimming. The text gets simpler, unfamiliar words that have to stay are explained where they appear, and a clear image sits beside each point to support the meaning rather than to decorate it. The step both sets of guidance put at the centre is the one teams skip. Develop and check the document with people from the audience it was written for, because nobody else can tell you whether it worked. Put a finished one next to the plain English version of the same thing and they do not look like two drafts of one document. They look like two documents.
Inclusion Europe owns the European Easy-to-Read Logo as well as the standards, so a document carrying that mark is making a claim about meeting them. Britain comes at it differently, treating easy read as one of the accessible communication formats a public body offers, alongside large print, braille, audio and British Sign Language. Each of those has its own rules rather than a shared set.
WCAG never asks for it. The nearest rule is 3.1.5, which sits at Level AAA and asks for supplemental content or a simpler version where text demands more than lower secondary reading ability. That alongside-version shape is the same shape easy read has, which is why the two get confused, and why meeting one is not the same as meeting the other.
Why it matters
Plain language and easy read are not two settings of one dial. Plain language is how you write everything, for everybody. Easy read is a separate document produced for a named audience, and a team that thinks it has done easy read by shortening its sentences has done neither. The other half of this is who gets it. Producing easy read only for the disability pages is the common shape, and UK government guidance names four subjects that make the argument against it. Health, voting, work and gaining skills.
Not a shorter version of the same page
Simple sentences carrying one idea each, an image beside each of them, unfamiliar words explained where they cannot be avoided, and the result checked with readers from the audience it names. Cutting your existing copy in half produces shorter copy and nothing else.
Where this shows up on the site
Related terms
- Plain languagePlain language is writing that lets somebody find what they need, understand it the first time, and act on it.
- Reading levelReading level is how much schooling a piece of text assumes, and WCAG measures it in years rather than in ages.
- Cognitive disabilityCognitive disability is a broad group of conditions affecting how people take information in, hold on to it, and act on it.
- DyslexiaDyslexia is a set of processing difficulties that affect the acquisition of reading and spelling.
Knowing the word is the easy part.
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