Overcoming Language Barriers to Environmental Information: A Study of Easy-to-Read Adaptations

Abstract

Access to clear and scientifically verified information is crucial to understand the scale of the challenge of the climate crisis, allowing policymakers, governments, and individuals to better respond to it. However, for some, including people with intellectual and cognitive disabilities as well as those who have difficulty reading, climate science can be difficult to understand with complex sentence structures and jargon obscuring important environmental information. The aim of this paper is to assess the main linguistic barriers to information about the climate crisis for people with intellectual and cognitive disabilities and reading difficulties. Using the examples of the Greater London Authority’s Environment Strategy Executive Report and the Northern Ireland Executive Discussion Document on a Northern Ireland Climate Change Bill, and their adaptations into Easy-to-Read as our corpus, we will examine the different morphosyntactic and lexical elements of each text. Our results show that both Easy-to-Read versions were generally easier to understand than the standard versions. However, the Northern Ireland Easy-to-Read text was more syntactically complex with longer and more complicated sentence structures, owing to its function as a consultation document. We conclude that the main access barriers in the Northern Ireland Easy-to-Read text are related to its morphosyntactic elements, a conclusion supported by our qualitative analysis of the standard text. More generally, the lexical aspects of both Easy-to-Read texts showed positive results, which suggests that they may be more easily simplified compared to morphosyntactic aspects. However, more systemic and contrastive research is required to confirm our findings, in addition to user testing with people with cognitive and intellectual disabilities and those who have difficulties reading.