A study of easy-to-read adaptations in climate communication : a corpus analysis
Pujadas Farreras, Marina (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
McDonagh, Sarah (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

Imprint:	Springer, 2024
Description:	13 pàg.
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 cognitive disabilities as well as individuals 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 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 to determine their overall level of complexity, such as sentence structure or vocabulary. 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 manual 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 disabilities and individuals who have difficulty reading.
Grants:	European Commission. Horizon 2020 101036480
Note:	Altres ajuts: acords transformatius de la UAB
Note:	This research has been partially funded by the H2020 project GreenSCENT
Rights:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Language:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Subject:	Easy-to-read ; Corpus analysis ; Climate change ; Accessibility
Published in:	Universal Access in the Information Society, 2024 , ISSN 1615-5297

DOI: 10.1007/s10209-024-01112-3

13 p, 1.4 MB

The record appears in these collections:
Research literature > UAB research groups literature > Research Centres and Groups (research output) > Arts and Humanities > TransMedia Catalonia
Articles > Research articles
Articles > Published articles