Bringing Inclusion to Life: Translating the United Nations’ Disability Inclusion Strategy into Easy Read
- Meg
- Sep 11
- 2 min read
In 2019, the United Nations shared its Disability Inclusion Strategy. The strategy is a plan to make the United Nations inclusive and accessible to disabled people. The strategy is built on the idea that including disabled people is not optional but essential for making sure that all people get their human rights met.
The United Nations’ Disability Inclusion Strategy sets out organisation-wide goals for inclusion, from making sure disabled people are represented in leadership roles to checking that the information the United Nations writes is accessible to all.
The United Nations checks how well its strategy is working every year to make sure that its inclusivity of disabled people is improving. This places responsibility directly on organisations and countries within the United Nations to incorporate disability inclusion across all their activities.
Why the United Nations’ Disability Inclusion Strategy needs to be accessible
The United Nations shares its disability inclusion progress with the public every year in an annual report. But if the reports and progress updates are only available in long and hard documents, then a large number of disabled people are automatically excluded from understanding or engaging with them.
That’s why Easy Read matters.
Easy Read uses simple words, short sentences, and images to explain difficult ideas. It was designed so that people with learning disabilities can understand important information. But it’s not only for them – Easy Read benefits:
People who speak English as a second language.
People who have tiredness or exhaustion that affects the way they take in information.
Anyone who prefers information in plain, visual formats.
When the United Nations’ Disability Inclusion Strategy annual reports are translated into Easy Read, it means:
Disabled people can engage with a strategy that directly affects their rights.
Disabled people can form their own opinions about progress, not just rely on someone else to interpret the report.
Disabled people can hold organisations and countries within the United Nations to their commitments, because they have direct access to the plans that have been made.
Disabled people can celebrate progress, but also demand more if inclusion is happening too slowly.
The United Nations is bringing inclusion to life. It is fulfilling one of its promises to write information that is accessible to all.
Our role in translating the United Nations’ Disability Inclusion Strategy annual reports into Easy Read
Each year, Easy Read Online has been commissioned by the United Nations to translate the annual reports into Easy Read, and we involve people with learning disabilities in this process. We are honoured to do this because for us accessibility isn’t just a tick-box exercise, it’s about practising “nothing about us without us.”
By making Easy Read versions available, we help the United Nations achieve the change it calls for.
You can check out some of the Easy Read annual reports here:
