Easy Read and Engagement: How making information accessible can increase and improve engagement

Meg
4 days ago
3 min read

What is engagement?

Engagement is about an audience actively paying attention to, interacting with, and connecting with a piece of content. Content includes a wide range of things, but in this blog post, we are focusing on general information.

An illustration of a girl sitting at her desk on her laptop.

Illustration of 2 booklets, one with a house and keys on it and another with a doctor smiling and giving a thumbs up.

Information is important to living our lives the way that we want. If we have a health issue, we are likely to look for information about our symptoms, health services in our area and possible treatments. If we would like to rent a home, we need information about our housing rights, what we cannot do as tenants and how to pay rent.

This important information should be engaging. Engaging information is useful, understandable and worth the reader’s attention. So what does non-engaging information look like? Non-engaging information:

Uses difficult language, long and wordy sentences, and heavy jargon, forcing readers to work harder just to understand the message.
Has unnecessary diversions which interrupt the flow of reading.
Can feel cold or distant because of technical language, which makes the reader feel ‘out of place’ and weakens the reader’s connection with the information.

Illustration of a booklet with scribbles all over it and a young man with his thumbs down.

The overall effect of non-engaging information is a lack of interest in the information. If readers cannot grasp the main message of the information, the information becomes useless. For organisations that share non-engaging information, this can result in both internal and external issues:

Lower productivity - When internal information is unclear or hard to follow, employees may make more mistakes, stop paying attention, skim important updates, or disengage altogether.
Missed opportunities - Externally, customers may ignore or become frustrated with information that seems unclear or not important to them, resulting in them choosing a different organisation to provide the product or service they need.
Damage to trust - Non-engaging information that feels confusing, poorly communicated or ‘pretentious’ can make the organisation appear out of touch with people’s needs, reducing the trust people have in them.

Easy Read and engagement

At its core, Easy Read stands in direct opposition to non-engaging information. Easy Read versions of information:

Use simple, clear language and short sentences.
Only use jargon and technical language when absolutely necessary, and will define the word used in these instances.
Only include the most important and relevant information from a piece of information.
Address the audience on a personal level.

Therefore, Easy Read versions of information can be described as much more engaging. When organisations share Easy Read versions of their information, they have the opportunity to reach:

People with learning disabilities.
People who are not experts in the topic of the information.
Non-native speakers.

Reaching these groups of people within their audience can have great benefits to the organisation.

Illustration of a laptop with an upward graph on it and an Easy Read document alongside.

Highlighting surveys and consultations

Illustration of a survey form on a clipboard.

Two important processes in any organisation are:

Collating and acting upon customer feedback.
Asking customers for their thoughts on a proposed change.

The main ways organisations do this are by sharing surveys and consultations with their customers. Ensuring these surveys and consultations are engaging is vital to receiving useful, insightful and correct feedback and views. If customers do not understand what is being asked of them or what they are being asked to comment on, they will not provide useful feedback, or may even not engage with the survey or consultation at all.

Providing Easy Read versions of surveys and consultations can ensure engagement. It also means people with learning disabilities can share their thoughts and opinions, which:

Helps organisations to make good decisions and changes for everyone, not just people without disabilities.
Builds trust between organisations and their disabled customers.

How we can help at Easy Read Online

At Easy Read Online, organisations commission us to translate their information into Easy Read.

If your organisation is interested in doing this, you can find out more on our website: www.easy-read-online.co.uk