Making Our Web-based Information More Accessible

Neatly following on from the project described by the German CIS last month, who shared how they had made their written material more accessible to people with lower literacy, this month Cancer Research UK describe a similar project to find out how we might make our web-based information more accessible for those with literacy problems.

It is estimated that around 42% of the British public have lower literacy (low educational attainment in our compulsory school examinations taken at age 15/16), and may struggle with information about health and illness.  Therefore, it is important that information about health and illness is provided in such a way that people with lower literacy can understand it.

The majority of Cancer Research UK’s patient information about cancer is web based rather than printed. This information is presented in a way that is fundamentally different to print information.

Currently we try hard to make sure that all our information is in plain language, has medical terms explained, uses short sentences and has plenty of white space.  But we wanted to find if there was more we could do to make it easy to read and understand.

To do this our Patient Information Web team held a focus group to test our information with people with lower literacy.  We partnered with the organisation Change who specialise in developing easy read materials for people with learning difficulties or lower literacy.

Some of the key findings were

• Use less text
• Use more pictures, but these must be relevant to the text
• Use Videos
• Use Voice overs
• Provide a summary

Our next steps will be to develop materials and do further testing.

For further information contact martin.ledwick@cancer.org.uk