Text accessibility and inclusion paradoxes
Henk Pander Maat (Utrecht University)
Text is an extremely efficient technology for long-distance linguistic communication: it can be carefully edited before sending, may convey complex and large chunks of information, can be quickly transmitted to large numbers of receivers, and it lends itself for flexible, individualized processing (e.g. quick, slow, selective, repeated). Most organizations rely on text for their standardized client communication. Of course, all these benefits come at a cost: text processing requires literacy on the part of the user, meaning the ability to independently read and comprehend text. This makes literacy a precondition for economic, bureaucratic, and political participation, health management and so forth.
I will discuss some critical components of literacy, as well as different kinds of text processing barriers. Then I will look at attempts to reduce the literacy demands of texts by making them more accessible or ‘inclusive’. The so-called Plain Language movement, which has been around for more than 80 years, aims to provide comprehensible texts to a general lay audience. In the last decades have seen the rise of Easy Language, a written language variant aimed at groups with specific reading problems. In countries such as Germany, Easy Language (EL) has been extensively codified, and been made legally obligatory to some extent. The EL writing rules are quite restrictive. For instance, negations are discouraged, and every sentence needs to start at a new line.
Now such accessibility interventions face several inclusion paradoxes, in the sense that inclusion often also implies exclusion. First, simplifying text will tend to lose information, to the extent that restricting linguistic complexity will also restrict expressivity. Second, the target groups for simplification differ vastly in their literacy profiles, so that it is improbable that a single text design formula design suits all of them; it may even be that a target group does not use text at all. Third, some simplification strategies may put off mainstream readers, so that accessible texts may be perceived as deviant. I will discuss the first challenge by analyzing pairs of original and simplified text. To assess the other two challenges, I will review empirical work on the comprehension and acceptability of re-designed texts, distinguishing between plain language and easy language revisions.
Selected readings
Bock, B. M., & Pappert, S. (2023). Leichte Sprache, einfache Sprache, verständliche Sprache. Narr Francke Attempto Verlag.
Grotlüschen, A., & Buddeberg, K. (2020). LEO 2018: Leben mit geringer Literalität. Wbv Media, Bielefeld.
Maaß, C. (2020). Easy language–plain language–easy language plus: Balancing comprehensibility and acceptability. Frank & Timme.
Pander Maat, H., Kleijn, S., & Frissen, S. (2023). LiNT: een leesbaarheidsformule en een leesbaarheidsinstrument. Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing, 45(1), 2-39.
Schriver, K. A. (2017). Plain language in the US gains momentum: 1940–2015. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 60(4), 343-383.
González-Sordé, M., Matamala, A. (2023). Empirical evaluation of Easy Language recommendations: a systematic literature review from journal research in Catalan, English, and Spanish. Universal Access Information Society 1-19.