Easy Read and intersectionality

Becky
Aug 21
3 min read

Easy Read is about making information clear and accessible for as many people as possible. To do that, we need to understand how people’s experiences shape how they see the world, and how the world sees them.

That’s where intersectionality comes in. It helps us think about the different identities a person might have, and how those identities affect their needs, experiences, and how they’re represented.

In this blog, we’ll explore intersectionality and how it helps us to create more inclusive and effective Easy Read documents.

What is intersectionality?

Intersectionality is about how the different parts of a person’s identity work together to shape their experiences. Things like your gender, race, sexuality, religion, disability and income can affect you in different ways.

Intersectionality recognises that every person has a unique identity that affects how they live and understand the world.

For example, a disabled woman from a wealthy family may face ableism and sexism at the same time. Because of this, she may experience the world in a different way from non-disabled women or disabled men.

Meanwhile, her wealth won’t cancel out her other identities, but it would likely make it easier to deal with the extra costs of being disabled.

An illustration of a large diverse group of people.

Intersectionality in Easy Read

Intersectionality and images

The main purpose of images in Easy Read is to help people understand the text better. These images often include people in different poses and situations, from giving the thumbs up to playing a musical instrument.

Illustration of a young man and a young woman with a learning disability. The young man has his thumbs up and the young woman has her hand on his shoulder.

Illustration of a young black man holding a guitar and writing music on a page.

This means we also have a great opportunity to show people from all walks of life. Most Easy Read users are people with learning disabilities, so we always make sure that this demographic is well represented in our work. However, it’s not enough to stop there.

Illustration of a young woman with a learning disability and an older lady next to her. The young lady is reading from a piece of paper and the older lady is helping her.

When we’re creating Easy Read documents, we think about the people who might read them, and how to represent those people.

Some readers may have more than one disability, or their disability may be invisible. Disabled people exist in every community, so it’s important to show people from different cultures and ethnic backgrounds.

We also think about what the document is about. If we need to create a report about people in Nepal, we’ll focus on using images of Nepalese people where possible. If we’re doing an Easy Read guide for elderly people, we’ll veer away from images of children or younger adults.

Illustration of a group of women of different ages and nationalities.

Asking these questions and thinking about intersectionality helps us to create accessible documents that showcase diversity.

Intersectionality and language

As Easy Read writers, it’s our job to use the right language for difficult topics without overloading the reader with too much information. However, the language around intersectionality and identity can be hard to simplify.

If one of our writers is struggling to write a definition for a word in a document, or we think a definition needs updating, we’ll ask other team members for advice. Listening to different perspectives and ideas can help us represent ideas and identities in a better way.

Illustration of a team of diverse people sat around a table working together.

The way we talk about issues and identities is always evolving, so the way we write about them in Easy Read documents has to evolve along with them. This is where listening to experts comes in handy!

We often work with people from different organisations, services and charities that specialise in supporting disabled people, as well as Easy Read experts from our local MenCap group. Listening to their ideas can help us understand what works well and what we need to tweak.

Examples of our work

If you want a better idea of the work we’ve done in the past, you can check out our projects page.

Or if you want to take a closer look at our illustrations, our Instagram page has some examples of how we represent people from different backgrounds in our images.