Accessibility is very close to our hearts at TLS; it’s also a legal obligation under the Equality Act (2010). All organisations must provide information to their users in an accessible format.
What does this mean? Accessibility covers so many different areas, but at its heart just means considering your entire audience and the various barriers they may face in communicating with you.
Easy Read is a method of taking complex information and re-working it into an accessible, easy-to-understand format. This can help learning disabled service users to live more independently and have more agency in decisions about their lives.
The basic guidelines of Easy Read are:
- Text should be broken down into short sentences
- Images should be selected to represent each sentence of text where possible
- Language should be simplified wherever possible, and any necessary complicated words or terms should be explained
- Text should be in a large font size, minimum 14pt
- Text should be presented on A4 pages where possible, as A5 or smaller are not as accessible
- Text should always be aligned on the right hand side of the page, and images should be aligned on the left-hand side of the page
- Complex or ornate fonts or formatting should be avoided
- Design elements should be kept to a minimum so as not to distract from the information.
Talk to us if you would like to know more about providing Easy Read translations for your service users, either by speaking to your account manager or calling 0203 376 8182