What is low literacy?

... and how do we design for these users?

About 1 in 10 people in the UK are dyslexic. Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that causes trouble with reading and writing, but doesn’t affect overall intelligence. When we’re talking about ‘low literacy’, we also include beneficiary groups who don’t know how to read, or who have cognitive impairments. They might be old, have learning disabilities, or they might just be distracted and stressed.

Future blog posts will be about how accessiblity makes services better for everyone. For now, we’ll talk about the difference between dyslexia and low literacy.

Dyslexia is only one kind of low literacy

I’ve got a good friend who’s just finished his master’s in electrical engineering and is now working on advanced military electronics that he can’t tell me too much about. He’s incredibly intelligent. He’s also profoundly dyslexic, so struggles with longform reading and needs more time for writing reports.

Dyslexia is one form of low literacy, but it’s the kind that’s relatively easy to design for. When designing for someone who’s very intelligent but has difficulty perceiving language, you might do things like:

• Create strong contrast between the text and background colours, so that letters are easy to make out.

• Use an accessibility widget like Recite me, which you can see here in practice. These allow users to change the font, size and colour of text, and read it out loud.

• Restrict the use of animations or interactive elements, which can make it hard to follow along with what’s on the page.

• Write in a simple style using a conversational tone and short phrases. Use the present active tense. The Government Digital Service content guide is excellent.

For some user groups that’s not enough. My friend the engineer has dyslexia, but otherwise has high digital literacy and no cognitive impariments. He can navigate complex webpages to find the services he needs, and then figure out how to interact with those services until he gets the results he wants.

But dyslexia is a very specific form of low literacy that does not affect a person’s ability to do other things. Many people with low literacy also struggle with other cogntitive tasks. A ‘cognitive task’ is a purposely broad term for activity that involves mental processes like perception, attention, memory or problem solving.

This is the challenge when designing for such users: to create a service that uses the minimum amount of cognitive capacity. In other words: make it easy.

Designing for other low literacy users

Dyslexic users may have difficulty with certain aspects of reading and writing but they have a good understanding of written material. Low literacy users may struggle to understand even simple instructions or text. This means that designers have to make the necessary information easy to understand.

You can make writing easier to understand by using clear, simple language and avoiding jargon and technical terms. Even basic terms like ‘tenant’, ‘landlord’, or ‘social housing’ can trip up the lowest literacy users. Visual elements can really help to make these understandable. The Easy Read tenant satisfaction measures are a great example of this in practise. Notice how they:

• Never use sentences more than one phrase long. The only commas in the whole document are in the quoted survey questions.

• Define all the terms they use

• Use a very limited vocabulary of common words

• Use images of everything they talk about, with clear facial expressions. These aren’t icons, they’re clear, life-like photos.

So far we’ve been talking about writing, but they also do a lot with the structure of the piece. Notice how they:

• Only have one column of content. Low-literacy users don’t scan text, they read line-by-line, so the structure facilitates that.

• This is designed to be printed out. All people read better in print than on screens, but it’s an even greater effect for low-literacy users. It also makes it easy for an assistant to sit with someone and talk them through the survey if necessary.

If we bring this back to digital services, we get a structure that involves having one column of content, and only one thing per section. It suggests we should use a limited vocabulary and simple sentences. Anyone who is familiar with the Government Digital Service (GDS) design style will recognise this: it’s exactly what they do.

Users of a service — whether that’s the tax system, their benefits, or their home — must be able to, well, use the service. If they can’t do it digitally, organisations often have a statutory duty to help the user do it in person or over the phone. That kind of client support is expensive for the organisation and inconvenient for the user.

Bringing low literacy design to housing associations

And this is what we do: we design services for housing associations that can be used by anyone. GDS found that incorporating low literacy design has saved billions over the last 10 years — billions which can be used to deliver more and better services. They talk about specific cases in the Department for Work and Pensions:

DWP now estimates that the pipeline process has saved 60% in staff costs (the number of times people have to review, assure or question activity) and 40% in hours. This is time and money that has, in effect, been given back to DWP project teams to focus on improving services for users rather than on process, without any increase in the level of risk or failure.

And also in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

BEIS estimates that the pipeline process has saved 60% in people costs and 35% in time, while the Ministry of Justice says the cost of governance in running the pipeline process compared to the previous controls mechanism has been reduced by around 27%.

Designing for low literacy users not only includes people who have historically been excluded, it also saves the organisation a lot of money and time. It’s transforming the public sector. Even in an age of austerity, the government is investing heavily in low-literacy digital services because the investment case is just that good.

This is what we’d like to help your housing association achieve. If you’re interested, book a call here.