Hello from the Easy Read Online team!
Here’s a quick update on the Easy Read work we’ve been doing this month.
‘I Need Easy Read’ campaign
This month we met up with the group of Mencap Liverpool and Sefton members who have been collaborating with us on this campaign. We are continuing to work on establishing the ‘I Need Easy Read’ campaign.
This is a campaign to promote the right to accessible information for people with learning disabilities.
We are moving forward with the promotion stage of the campaign and have produced some leaflets and accessibility cards. Please feel free to download and use these or share them with anyone who would benefit from them!
We are putting the finishing touches to a shiny new campaign website which will be a place to share information and resources about Easy Read.
What we’ve learned from working with people with learning disabilities
We regularly involve people with learning disabilities to check our Easy Read documents and discuss best practices for making information more accessible.
One of the things we learned this month is in relation to symbols and icons within Easy Read images. We often add symbols or icons to an image to emphasise the meaning of part of the sentence. For example, an upward arrow to emphasise that something will ‘improve’, or ‘increase’. But we’ve found that symbols and icons can be abstract, because they require the reader to recognise the symbol/icon and to understand the context.
We’ve now started to include a small text box beside/above/below any symbols or icons to make them explicitly clear. An upward arrow to emphasise that something will improve now includes the word ‘better’ below it; an arrow that emphasises an increase now includes the word ‘more’ below it etc. This small change has had a largely positive effect on users’ interpretation of the Easy Read information.
Spotlight Project: ticket office changes
This month we’ve been busy creating lots of Easy Read information about the changes to ticket offices at train stations in England. You may well have heard that large-scale closures of ticket offices are proposed and the consultation about this closes soon. We were pleased to see that many people on social media were asking for Easy Read versions of the consultation information - a sign that Easy Read is increasingly seen as a standard accessibility format. We hope that the Easy Read consultation information has supported more people to engage with the consultation.
Thank you
That’s all from our Newsletter for this month. We hope you have a good month ahead!
As ever, if you need to request a quote for information in Easy Read, you can use our online form: