At Future Pathways, we work with a range of services to help people access support. This includes making our information accessible to people. Here, we chat to Claire from Disability Equality Scotland. She tells us more about creating Easy Read documents. And gives tips for how we can all make our information easier to understand.
Firstly, can you tell us a bit about Disability Equality Scotland?
Disability Equality Scotland is a membership organisation for disabled people and disability groups and organisations. We often call ourselves DES for short.
We want to hear about disabled people’s experiences of accessibility, inclusion and equality, good or bad! This information helps us when we meet with key decision makers who are responsible for ensuring equality and human rights are in place with policies and the law.
We are trying to make Scotland accessible and inclusive to everyone.
Image: Marit, Claire, Shona – the Easy Read team at Disability Equality Scotland
What’s your role at Disability Equality Scotland?
I am one of the Easy Read Creators, along with my colleagues Shona and Marit. Being an Easy Read Creator means taking an original document – like a survey, a letter, an information leaflet or a report – and simplifying it into an Easy Read version. This can then be offered alongside the original and reach many more people thanks to its easy-to-understand text and pictures.
Easy Read versions are brilliant for reaching:
Future Pathways has worked with you to make Easy Read versions of our booklets. Can you tell us more about how you do these?
It’s been great working with Future Pathways to produce documents like the Easy Read Information Pack and Easy Read How to get your In Care records.
A good example is this one about Easy Read Support While You Wait.
To make this, I identified the most important information and rewrote it in shorter, easier sentences. For trickier words like ‘care records’, I added a definition to explain what it means.
I made sure that the Easy Read version gave the information in the most helpful order. Finally, I added helpful images for each chunk of Easy Read information and a hidden description to each image, called alt-text. This is so that anyone using a screen reader and who may not be able to see the images can have the alt-text read out to them by their screen reader. This may help them to better understand the wording.
What tips can you give services for making their materials more accessible?
Can people take part in your work?
Yes! We have an Easy Read User Feedback Group who send us feedback on our Easy Read documents. If you would like to join the group, we would be very happy to welcome you and send you a document each month to have a look at.
To find out more, please email easyread@disabilityequality.scot
If you want to join a training course to write your own Easy Read documents, or to understand how to make your content more accessible, you can reach our outstanding trainers Sonya and Lilly at training@disabilityequality.scot
We are also very proud to be part of a large group of Easy Read organisations working together with Easy Read users to make a new set of Easy Read Standards for the UK. Our aim is to make sure that Easy Read users can get the same style of high-quality Easy Read material across the UK. It’s due to be published in Autumn 2026 and we are so pleased to be a part of it!
If you are interested in Disability Equality Scotland, you can become a member for free and join over 1 thousand disabled people sharing their views on access and inclusion in Scotland.
