Welcome everyone to the IDEA speaker series. My name is Francis Fung and I am the engagement lead for IDEA and also a senior manager with the skills development and employment team at March of Dimes Canada, which is a national charity that provides supports to people with disabilities and also a partner of IDEA. Before we begin uh please note that we are recording this session and the recordings will be made available to our idea website. For those of you who may not know much about IDEA, it is a social innovation lab focused on helping create stronger and more diverse labor markets that includes persons with disabilities through knowledge to practice. IDEA is the acronym for inclusive design for employment access. Before we start the webinar today, I'd like to share a land acknowledgement relevant to the IDEA National Office in Toronto where the National Office of the Idea is situated has for thousands of years been the traditional land of the Huron Wendant and the Senica and most recently the Mississaugas of the Credit. Today, this land is still home to many indigenous people from across Turtle Island and we are grateful to have the opportunity to conduct our work on it. This acknowledgement is relevant to Toronto and since we are gathered here virtually, we suggest that you think of the communities in your respective locations as well. This webinar series uh sorry, this webinar series serves as an opportunity to hear the latest about current topics in the work disabilities policy arena and learn about activities underway within and beyond IDEA. During the last 10 to about 15 minutes of this webinar, we'll hold a question and answer period. You can type your questions in the Q&A box at any time throughout the presentation and we'll answer as many questions as we can at the end of the webinar. You should be able to find the Q&A button on the very bottom of your Zoom uh platform screen. So, let me introduce our speaker for today uh Rachel Mills. Rachel is a policy analyst with Inclusion Canada, a national organization working to advance the full inclusion and human rights of people with an intellectual disability and their families. As a registered social worker, Rachel has dedicated her career to working in the nonprofit sector, primarily in the disability inclusion field. She has a particular interest in writing and making information accessible and inclusive using plain language. Thank you for joining us today, Rachel. And I'll turn it over to you now. That's great. Thank you very much, Francis. So, I am just going to take a minute here to put the slides on my screen and we will dive in. All right,

that's great. Okay, so thank you Francis for the introduction and thank you everyone um for being here today. As Francis mentioned, um I have an interest in plain language and accessibility and I'm looking forward to sharing some of what I've learned with you here today. Um I also want to acknowledge um that I am coming to you today from the traditional unseated territory of the Wistiquay uh Migmaw and Pasamquadis people um also known as New Brunswick. So when we talk about accessibility and in particular document accessibility, most people think about things like font, color contrast, and screen reader accessibility. And all of those things are important, but we know that accessibility goes beyond just fonts and formatting. Plain language is an ac essential and often overlooked part of accessibility. So today we're going to focus on tips and strategies for writing in plain language. And a quick uh image description of the cartoon I've got on our title screen here. We've got uh someone sitting be behind a desk with a piece of paper in their hand and an employee standing in front of them. And the caption on the cartoon says, "Excellent mumbo jumbo foster. The computer didn't understand a word of it.

So to start um let's define what we mean by plain language. So plain language is a style of writing that presents information using the clearest terms that the message will allow. It's primarily textbased and it looks and sounds basically like standard types of writing. The thing is plain language is about more than just the words we use. It also includes structure and design elements, things like tables of contents, headings, lists, and whites space to support understanding and usability. It uses an active writing style that speaks directly to the audience. And plain language advocates for the use of everyday words and short sentences and paragraphs. On this slide, we have a definition from plain language association international. A communication is in plain language if its wording, structure, and design are so clear that the intended audience can easily find what they need, understand what they find, and use that information.

So, uh, fun fact for you. Um, in October of 2025, Canada published its first national standard on plain language. Um, I had the pleasure of being a member of the technical committee that helped shape that standard. Um, and I do have a link included here in my PowerPoint presentation to the standard. I'm happy to share my PowerPoint after the presentation. Um, and a member of the team is also going to drop that link in the chat for you in case you'd like to check it out for yourself.

So, before we dive into tips and strategies, I'd like to dispel a myth about plain language. So, there's a misconception that plain language is an alternative format that's only useful for people with an intellectual disability. The reality is that everyone can benefit from plain language. Uh for example, people are who are in a hurry. So people like employers, educators, uh medical and legal professionals, language learners whose first language in the Canadian context may not be English or French, people with low literacy levels, as well as people with disabilities. Now, I recently had somebody ask me about how plain language would support people who are in a hurry. The person who was speaking to me correctly pointed out that plain language is often longer. It often uses more words. So, how could it possibly save time? The thing with plain language is that it reduces the mental processing power or cognitive load that's required for people to find what they need, understand it the first time, and take action. So if we think about this in an employment context, specifically plain language is valuable because it saves time, energy, and prevents costly mistakes. Presenting plain lang sorry presenting information in plain language helps people understand and apply information correctly the first time. So for example, think of a manager whose staff manual is not written in plain language. The manager has to dedicate valuable time and energy to reexlain the information that was unclear. Or another scenario, an employee reading the manual misunderstands the information and makes a mistake that the company must now correct, costing the business financial and human resources. Plain language isn't just the right thing to do, it makes good business sense.

So an important question to ask ourselves is how do we know or how do I know if my communication is in plain language? It's important to understand that the only people who can determine if your communication is in plain language is your audience. Only the intended audience can say if the wording, structure, and design of your communication are so clear that they can easily find what they need, understand what they find, and use that information. What is plain for one audience may not be plain language for another. And that's why knowing your audience is so important, and we're going to talk about that in a minute. At the end of the day, testing your communication with your intended audience is the only way to make sure that your communication is in plain language.

So now I'd like to talk briefly about the steps to using plain language. And because we have limited time in this webinar today, I'm going to focus on the practical aspects of number three, which is how to write in plain language. But it's important to understand that all of these steps work together to create plain language communication. We can't skip steps because plain language is about more than just the words we use. So let's walk through each step step briefly. Step one, identify your intended audience and purpose. We need to know our audience and there's often more than one. This step includes consulting and engaging with your intended audience about their information needs and any barriers they face. So we want to know things like what does the audience already know about this topic? Does this communication require any prior knowledge to understand it? Where and when will the audience be using this communication? For example, are they going to be rushed or stressed while they're using it? We also want to consider things like the audience's age, gender, culture, literacy level, uh, language, if there are formats that they prefer, and internet access. We also need to be clear about the purpose of the communication. What is the audience's reason and motivation for engaging with this communication? What information does the audience need or want to know? And what do you want the audience to be able to do after they've interacted with your communication?

Step two, structure and organize your information. The structure I is also an essential part of plain language communication. You should tell the audience in the first sentence or two what your communication is about. We want to organize ideas in a way that makes sense for the audience and choose one way to organize and be consistent throughout. So for example, uh you could organize your information in chronological order or stepbystep order. You want to pick one strategy and stick to it consistently.

Structure also means dividing your communication into short sections and we want to keep similar information grouped together in the same uh section and put the most important information first. People who are in a hurry often only read the first lines of a document or the first few lines of each section. And it's also important to include only essential information that's needed to achieve the purpose and ensure understanding. Leave out unnecessary information even if it's interesting. And that can be difficult for some of us as writers. We want to include all of those interesting details. I'm going to skip step number three for a minute because we're going to look at that in depth uh shortly. So, step four, design to support understanding. A document's design matters. Uh it's essential to use whites space to break up your text. And whites space is basically any area on the page that is not taken up by text or design. We want to aim for 40 to 55% of the space to be white space. It's a good practice to use extra line spacing between paragraphs instead of indenting. And it's also recommended to align your text to the left margin and leave the right margin ragged. We want to avoid justified alignment. Justified text may look neater, but it's actually more difficult to read, and it makes the spacing between words inconsistent. Things like using numbered and bulleted lists is also a strategy to break up your text and add white space to your design. We can use other design elements like bolding, boxes, borders, or words for emphasis. And it's recommended to avoid using all capitals or italics. It makes your text harder to read. And we typically like to reserve underlining for hyperlinks. You can also use visual elements to support understanding. Visuals can include things like photos, illustrations, charts, symbols, icons, and more. You want to pick visuals that make sense for your audience and have meaning for them. They should also represent the diversity of your audience. Um, and you should put your visuals close to the information that they're related to. And step five, test and revise uh the design and content. So important. Although this is listed as bullet number five, testing and revision is actually an ongoing process throughout the development of your communication and not something that's done at the end. Testing means asking for feedback at each stage and adjusting accordingly. It means showing your communication to members of the intended audience and getting their direct feedback. Testers should reflect the diversity of your audience. And sometimes we get asked about the number of testers you need. The number is going to depend on the size and diversity of your audience um and the importance of your communication to that audience. There are lots of different testing methods, but the goal is ultimately the same. You want to know whether people can find, understand, and use the information provided. Uh a few tips for you about testing. It's important to tell testers that you are testing the communication, not them. This is not a test of their skills. It is of the document that you have the document or communication that you have created. We also want to offer a variety of ways of giving feedback to make sure that the testing process is accessible to everyone. And after you publish your communication, um, it's not over. You want to continue evaluating it. So this means tracking outcomes or effectiveness. If your document was your communication was trying to get people to do something. Um, it means explicitly asking for feedback from the intended audience. Um, sometimes we can tend to use a strategy of no news is good news. Um, that's not necessarily the case. we need to explicitly ask for feedback. Um, and you should of course uh compensate your testers. Uh, one thing I want to mention, you may hear people talk about readability metrics and other measures. Um, readability tests use average numbers of syllables uh per per word and words per sentence to give you a readability score. These formulas don't look at the structure or design of a communication and they don't consider who the audience is. They are not appropriate or accurate ways to determine if a communication is in plain language. Testing your communication with the audience is the only way to make sure it's in plain language.

So now we're going to talk about step three, how to write using plain language. And in this section we're going to talk about first words, then sentences, paragraphs, and finally tone and voice.

So let's start with words. In plain language, we want to choose the simplest, shortest word that is familiar to the audience. Words with one or two syllables are ideal. So here are some examples of ways we can replace long complicated words with simpler ones. So instead of saying I'm going to demonstrate ways to make an interview more inclusive, I could say I'm going to show ways to make an interview more inclusive. Instead of there are many things I want to accomplish this year, I could say there are many things I want to do this year. And instead of we are going to disseminate these materials to community groups, we could say we are going to send these materials to community groups.

We also want to use simple conjunctions. And a conjunction is a word used to connect clauses or sentences or to coordinate words in the same clause. Basically, it's a joining word. Um, and so some examples of simple conjunctions are for and, but, or, and so. We want to avoid long and complicated joining words like therefore, consequently, and however.

We can also simplify our writing by deleting filler words and unnecessary details. Um, so I've got a few examples for you here. Um, so in these examples there is we have please submit your application no later than April 30th, 2022. I could rewrite that to say please submit your application by April 30th, 2022. Uh, in I could this letter is in regard to your J job application. I could substitute that with this letter is about your job application. And the last example, I appreciate the manner in which you handled that could be replaced with I appreciate the way you handled that. So remember, just because something is interesting doesn't mean it's necessary.

We also need to consider our intended audience when deciding whether to use contractions. And contractions are shortened forms of a word that omit certain letters or sounds. So examples of contractions are words like can't, won't, don't, and shouldn't. Unfamiliar contractions can increase confusion and the chance of misinterpretation. When your audience is people with an intellectual disability, like the community that I work with, we typically recommend using complete words instead of contractions. We avoid them altogether.

We also want to make sure that when we're writing, we're saying what we really mean. So when writing in plain language, we want to choose concrete words and examples and not abstract ones. For example, uh you must work hard to get promoted is an abstract idea. What does that look like? Um what does working hard look like in concrete terms? That's the type of description we want in our plain language writing.

We also need to be careful about using figures of speech like idioms, metaphors, and hyperbole. So, for example, keep an eye out for the press release next week. Let's do some introductions to break the ice. You're barking up the wrong tree with that advocacy approach. I want to address the elephant in the room. These are all figures of speech. Figures of speech should only be used when the intended audience knows and understands them. For some audiences, it's recommended to avoid them altogether. This is another reason why it's so important to know your intended audience. Idioms are often culturally specific and don't hold the same meaning for everyone. They can also be difficult to translate and understand in other languages and idioms can be interpreted literally and therefore are confusing to some audiences.

In plain language writing, it's standard to explain unfamiliar words or technical terms. There's a myth that technical terms can't be used in plain language writing and that's not accurate. Technical terms can be used when the intended audience needs to learn the unfamiliar word in order to meet their needs or when the audience understands and prefers that word. And if you wonder what I mean by a technical term, um, we mean a word, a phrase, or an acronym that professional you professionals use in their specific field to help them save time when communicating with other knowledgeable professionals. So, um, an example could be something like career advancement. Um, so I can use the term career advancement in my writing, but I want to explain what it means so that everybody has the same understanding. So here I've put in a sentence, career advancement means growing in your job by taking on more responsibilities, gaining new skills, or moving into different positions.

Jargon is similar to technical terms. Um, and jargon is special words or expressions that are used by a certain profession or group and they're difficult for other people to understand. So, ideally, we want to avoid jargon when we can. If a term has to be included, we want to explain what it means um so that everyone in the audience has that understanding. So, an example I've put in here of of employment jargon would be using seuite um when referring to senior executives in a business.

It's also recommended in plain language writing to avoid abbreviations including those from other languages. So, some examples include um eg when we could say for example i.e. when we could say that is uh etc. department uh d abbreviated dpt pt instead of saying department and vs instead of saying verses.

When it comes to using numbers in plain language writing, in general, numbers when they're depicted as numerals are consistently better understood than words by most audiences. Another benefit is that numerals tend to stand out within your text, so they get the audience's attention. So, usually we recommend using numerals to express the numbers 2 through 999. So, for example, we hired 10 new employees this year. When we're talking about very large, complex numbers, we want to break them down into simpler terms. So, an example here, there are more than 8 million, so we've got the numeral 8 and the word million people with disabilities in Canada.

Uh, now we're going to talk a little bit about acronyms. So, if you need to use an acronym or a shortened name um in your communication, you want to be sure to introduce it the first time you use it. So, a few examples here are ready, willing, and able, which is the name of inclusion Canada's employment initiative. Um, so we would write out ready, willing, enable and in brackets the first time it appears RWA. The another example, Canadian Union of Public Employees, if we're going to call it the union in the rest of our communication, we're going to put the union in brackets and employee assistance program in brackets, EAP. If you are using acronyms or abbreviations in a very long document, um it's a good idea to spell out or write out the full name plus the abbreviation in parentheses the first time it appears in every major section. Uh using unfamiliar abbreviations, it it increases the demand on your audience's working memory. they need to remember what that means, making it harder to follow the information in your communication. So that's why that's why this guidance exists around acronyms in shortened words. Um, we also want to be consistent in the language that we use. So we want to choose one term and use it to mean the same thing throughout our communication. So, an example of this is uh choosing between the term resumeé or CV and using that same term throughout the communication when you're talking about the same thing.

Uh so, some types of punctuation are also less familiar to certain audiences and may make your read your writing more difficult to understand. So typically it's recommended to limit, it doesn't mean we can't use them at all, but to limit the use of amperands, which is the and sign, parentheses, slashes, ellipses, exclamation marks, and semicolons. And so the example I have here is we do not support the creation of sheltered workshops and/or congregate work settings.

So, we've just talked about words. Now, let's talk about sentences. We want to use as few words as possible to clearly express our idea. And when we can, we use a basic sentence structure of subject plus verb plus object and write using the present tense. We aim for an average of 15 to 25 or sorry, we used to aim for an average of 15 to 25 words per sentence. The new plain language standard that I was telling you about at the beginning of the webinar actually recommends 7 to 12 words or 30 to 60 characters. So even shorter than what we we used to recommend. Um, some other things when you can, um, we want to complete sentences on a single line and start new sentences on a new line. It won't always be possible, but if your design allows for it, those are good strategies. And we want to keep words whole by starting and finishing them on the same line. So basically, we don't want to hyphenate words and have them break across lines. that makes it harder for the audience to follow and understand your writing. And we also want to avoid splitting sentences over two pages or two screens uh when you can. So I've got on the slide here an example of a sentence that is written in the present tense and that uses that subject verb object structure. So employers need reliable workers.

We also want to use the simplest form of a verb. Um or in other words, we want to avoid hidden verbs or nominalizations. And I've put together some examples to help you understand what I mean by a hidden verb. So, um, if I were to say inclusive employers consider the accessibility needs of their employees, that's great. A hidden verb would be inclusive employers take into consideration the accessibility needs of their employees. So, I hope you can see or hear the difference there. Take into consideration has sort of taken the action out of the verb and made it passive. Um, so this tends to we can get into this writing habit without realizing it. Um, so it's helpful to reread um your document and look for these types of hidden uh verbs and see where you can turn them back into active verbs. Another example, instead of saying our workplace culture is reflective of our values, we can make that the more active verb. our workplace culture reflects our values.

Um, so for sentences, we also want to try and keep our sentence to one idea. Um, and split sentences into two at conjunction words. So words like so, but and or where there would be a natural pause that would occur if you were to read the sentence out loud. Um, and if you need to explain a term, like I was saying earlier, there's a technical term you want to include, use a separate sentence to do that. So for example um I've got here inclusive employment is a smart dis business decision and many people with disabilities want to work. So if we apply this if I look for my conjunction word um so in this case it's it's in blue the word and that's a natural place where I could split this sentence and make it shorter. So I could say instead inclusive employment is a smart business decision. Period. Many people with disabilities want to work.

Something else we want to look for and try and avoid in our plain language writing is uh chains of nouns or noun strings. And a noun string is a group of nouns that are clumped together with all of them except the last one being or acting as a an adjective. And the issue with noun strings is that again it increases the mental load required of your audience. The audience has to work harder to untangle the message and understand the relationship between the words. Um so you want to eliminate descriptive words that aren't essential. People get confused thinking they've located the noun when they're actually still reading a string of descriptors. And so when we want to we're trying to reorder a string um what we often can do is start with the last word and then add prepositions or articles to clarify. So words like of to and for. So the original uh you know noun string here is employee performance management system. If we take the last word, which is what we're actually talking about, and putting it at the beginning, we could say a system, and then we explain what it's about. A system for managing employee performance.

Oh, sorry about that. Um, so paragraphs, uh, still still on the paragraph topic. We want to organize our information in clear, short paragraphs and focus on one idea per paragraph. We typically aim for about 150 words or four to five sentences uh for a paragraph, although the new plain language standard does not specify a length. And we want to break information into short, clear sections with headings.

Um, we want to put, as you heard earlier, the most important information first. Um, and we can break up complicated information with vertical lists and headings which can help people navigate the information and connect the ideas from one paragraph to the ideas in the next. Um, you can also use examples um, like we've been doing in this presentation to help support understanding. And remember, uh, plain language writing is intended to be easier to understand and to use. It does not necessarily mean that we're using fewer words. We're using shorter, simpler words, and we're structuring our paragraphs and sentences to be shorter. Um, but you can use more words if it will be helpful to support understanding. So, it's not about the length. We're not trying to condense the the overall length.

Um, so this this gets a little bit into um into design, but I've added it here along with our our paragraph conversation. And that's the the role of bulleted and ordered lists. So lists can make it easier for your intended audience to scan and navigate information and identify important information. And lists can be full sentences. They can be words, phrases, or fragments of sentences. And typically, when items in the list are full sentences, it's best to capitalize the first letter of each sentence and end with a period. And when the items are single words or phrases, we usually use lowercase. Um, and we don't use any punctuation at the end. So, um, we would use a list to group things that are similar. Um, when things need to be ordered, uh, when things are in a sequence priority, we would use an ordered list. Um, so like a list with numbers and an ordered an unordered list like a a list with just bullets. Um, when things the order doesn't matter or they're equally important. And for audiences of people with an intellectual disability, we typically try and limit our lists to five items or less. Um, when you're creating a list, you want to make sure you're using the same verb or noun form throughout the list. This is called parallel construction. So, here's an example. This job has many responsibilities colon and then our bullets are leading a team, writing funding proposals, tracking expenses. So you can see here all of my verbs are using that ing structure.

And you want to make sure that when you're using lists, you use a complete sentence to lead into your vertical list. So in this example we have on your first day of work you must provide the following items and then the bullets are your social insurance number your banking information your mailing list. So that first sentence at the top is a complete sentence leading into the list and to wrap up um we are going to talk just briefly about tone and active voice. So plain language writing uses a simple, easy to understand and conversational tone and we speak directly to the audience using the second person pronoun. So you um and when you're referring to yourself in your writing or your organization, we use the first person plural we or are. So some examples, if I was writing something in plain language, I would say if you have questions referring to my audience or our goal is if referring to my own organization.

Um, we also like to use uh positive tone or positive phrasing um because positive phrasing is easier to understand. It's more concise and it's more likely to be wellreceived by your audience. So, we want to tell people what they can or must do instead of what they cannot do. And we want to focus on what something is rather than what it is not. So an example would be you will get health benefits after working for 6 months. That is the positive tone. We would typically reserve negative tone to indicate danger, to warn people or when something is not allowed or to dispel a myth.

We also want to use an active writing style instead of a passive style. And we talked about this a little bit when we were talking about um those those hidden verbs. So an active voice um sentence clearly clearly identifies the action and who is performing the action. So the doer the subject of your sentence appears before the action before the verb. Um so an example here um instead of saying the accommodation was approved by the manager which is passive I would say okay who is the doer the manager in this case I would say the manager approved that's my verb the workplace accommodation uh we really want to avoid passive voice it tends to give your your communication a wordy and bureaucratic tone

And the last piece on this topic of positive tone and active voice um is one of the ways you can do this is by rereading your communication and looking for places where it might say it is or there are or there were um followed by a a relative pronoun like that, which or who. So here are some um examples. So instead of saying it is important that people with disabilities are consulted that is the more passive tone we would say we could say people with disabilities must be consulted or instead of there were many people who contributed to this project we could say many people contributed to this project.

So that is a very quick introduction to plain language and to a few strategies to help you write in plain language. Um I hope that this has been helpful. Um I'm going to sh stop sharing my PowerPoint now um and pass it back to Francis and I'm happy to field questions.

Yes. Uh thank you Rachel for uh the very comprehensive uh presentation. You gave a lot of uh tips and strategies and and also very um real examples as well. I I personally learned quite a bit. Um so just to remind the audience that the uh Q&A section is now uh active. So, um if you are not the most familiar with the Zoom platform, um on the very bottom of your um uh your your Zoom uh dashboard, you should find the Q&A button and you should be able to open that up and uh type in your questions. Um so, we have a little bit of time. So, Rachel, let's uh let's dive into some of the questions that our um audience quite eager to ask. So, you talked a little bit about using bullets earlier on. Um, I I believe you said complete sentences start with a capital uh letter and and and a period at the end uh versus you know uh words and phrases and stuff like that. Um, so a question we have in from the audience regarding um what about commas and like semicolons like what what what's the are there any suggestions from you regarding using comma or colons at the end of the bullet? Yeah, good question. So, um, semicolons are included in that list that we typically try and avoid. That punctuation may be a little bit less, um, familiar to some audiences. Um, I mean, commas are are okay. Um, and with with lists, what the gu the guidance we see in the plain language standard kind of depends on whether your list is a full sentence or whether it's like a fragment of a sentence. So, if it's a full sentence, then you're going to end it, you're going to start with a capital and you're going to end with a period. If what you're listing is a sentence fragment, so you're listing like a single word, single words or phrases, in that case, you would use a lowercase to start and you wouldn't use uh a period. Typically, we wouldn't use punctuation at the end at all. So, we probably wouldn't even use a comma, but again, a col comma is more likely to be familiar to your audience. So, I would say there's probably probably flexibility with that. Um, but the standard would say that punctuation is not necessary for those fragments when we're talking about bulleted lists. I see. Thank you. Um, so, um, there's another question from our audience which actually is very similar to what I also have in mind as well too. I know that sometimes when we're thinking about plain language and when it's used in um for certain purposes like legal or medical purposes, there are some concerns about like whether um you know simplified language will hold up in court. Um and are you aware of any um uh like regulations or or legislation like you know the the work compensation act you know are are those things like available in in language in in your experience? Yeah, that's an interesting question and I will I will acknowledge I am not a lawyer. Um I'm a social worker so I don't necessarily have expertise in that area. Um and in terms of like things holding up in court um I am not familiar with guidance that um is specific to um like certain acts being written in plain language. I guess what I have seen in my own my own work and experience is I have seen things like um international um pieces I know it's not legislation but international sort of legal agreements like UN conventions um have sometimes been uh translated into plain language. The other thing I would say when it comes to people being concerned about um kind of preserving the integrity of a message because this is something we see with with plain language uh translation is that one of the strategies we can use is to have um sub to use subject matter expert review. So, in addition to the the user testing or testing I was talking about, which is really about taking your communication to your audience and having them look at it, you can also have a subject matter expert review your plain language content and make sure that it it is still accurate and it does preserve the essence of the original um content. So I often do this if somebody asks me to um assist with translating something into plain language is that I will give it back to them and I will ask them to reread the translation and let me know whether I have still preserved that original intent or message. Um so I realize that's not an ideal answer. I I mean I'm happy to go back um there is a lawyer who's on our staff. I'm happy to go and ask him um whether he is familiar with anything around um plain language versions of legislation holding up in court um and if I find anything like that I can certainly share it back with the idea team. Thank you. Um so you talked a little bit about uh user testing uh actually quite a bit of that. Um and so sometimes user testing is not uh so easily accomplished. It takes times, resources and and there might be some urgency. So um an audience uh said that um um preparing for a presentation um soon but not so sure about the audience needs right like sometimes you don't know who may show up in the audience so on. So so what do you do in those scenario? Is there a way to, you know, um, approach your your plain language in a way, um, um, not making too many assumptions and, you know, what the audience may or may not understand. Yeah. Um, so it's a it's a good question and I think like if I think back to the idea of this that plain language is for everyone, right? So using short simple words um you know uh explaining unfamiliar terms. So in this case you're doing a presentation you don't know your audience you don't know what terms are unfamiliar to them. So don't make an assumption that people know it. I think that would be kind of my um my gut reaction to if you don't know your audience don't make assumptions about what they do or do not know. Um, so explain any term that could potentially be um unfamiliar. If there is information in your presentation that requires some background knowledge in order for people to understand, take the time to set the stage for the audience kind of assuming that they don't have that. um the tips that we talked about today in terms of like using short, concise, the simplest words possible. Um that's going to be good for everyone. So you don't know the literacy level of the audience you're speaking to. Those with a very high literacy level are still going to understand those short, concise words that you're choosing. So I think my uh my advice would be don't make assumptions. um try and speak to everyone and uh and kind of lay that groundwork. Don't assume people are coming in with certain knowledge or understanding. Right. Thank you. Uh what about uh the notion of writing um for a specific or up to a specific grade uh equivalency like so if you're um if your audience is let's say is a a faculty or student of a college or university is that appropriate then automatically to go to like more of a post-secary level or there suggestions about maybe grade a level or lower it's it's more acceptable for plain language what's your opinion on that yeah so I feel like this sort of ties ties into that conversation around readability metrics. So often if you were to use Microsoft Word or something like that and you were to do the get it to generate um like readability metrics for you, one of the things it would produce for you is a grade reading level. Uh Flech Concaid grade reading level. Um, like I said, the the the pitfall to those types of readability metrics are the only thing they're assessing is things like the number of um the number like how long your words are, how long your sentences are, and they're putting that into a formula and they're producing a score for you. Um, but it's not looking at things like the structure and design, how much white space, do you have images to support the understanding? Um, so it it's not like I wouldn't recommend it. It's it's not ideal. I mean, I think, you know, if you run something you've written through a great uh a um a readability metric um tool and it tells you your grade reading level is like 14 um right? So, you need post-secary education, that may be a good indicator to you that your document could use some reworking that there are that you could probably apply some of the strategies we've talked about today and you could probably bring that reading level down. You could simplify it. Um, but I would I would be reluctant to um use that as a standard of will my audience be able to find, understand, and use your material? Um, because it it may say it's a grade eight reading level, meaning you've used short words and short sentences, but the way you've laid that content out on your page may be incredibly cluttered and people can't find it. you haven't put in enough white space, you don't have any headings. Um, right? So, people can't navigate the order of your document. Um, so, and I have seen this before that there is kind of like um a number that floating around out there that like the average Canadian citizen has about a grade eight literacy level. Um, so some people will say, okay, well, that's what we should aim for, about grade 8. Um, again though, because of those those downfalls with uh the readability metrics being so limited in what they look at, um, you really want to consider your your communication or your document in in its entirety, its its structure, its design, all of these other elements, right? Thank you. Um so we have a question um around uh if you are aware any uh professional services that you may be able to contract to translate something into plain language. I I know personally I have used professional editors that claim that they have you know um some understanding and knowledge to be able to do things like that way but is there are you aware of any like particular specific services for this kind of uh support and and maybe if there's anyone that is more reliable or so on. Yeah. So I don't have a like I don't have a comprehensive list or anything like that. I I am familiar with some um plain language translators in the work we do because we work primarily with folks with an intellectual disability. Um we often work closely with People First of Canada, which is a national organization made up of people who have been labeled with an intellectual disability. They do some plain language translation. Um that is a service that they they offer. Um, and I think a key thing to flag is if you're looking for a plain language translator, there are certainly people with this expertise. There are educational courses that people can get certif certification in in plain language writing. Um, I think an important thing to highlight is is that testing piece a part of the process? So when we work with People First of Canada and we have them translate something, they translate the text and then they also have uh um a population of user testers who review that material, provide feedback. Um so that that testing and confirming that the the material is in fact plain language for our audience is built right into that process. Um, I could I you could give me a document today and I could rewrite it and tell you that it's in plain language, but if I haven't shown it to the intended audience and you haven't shown it to the intended audience, we can't actually claim it's in plain language. We don't know. So, yeah, thank you. Okay. Um, so um ideas all about employer um capacity building and and certainly employment is on a lot of people's minds. So we have a question around what about like résumés you know would would that benefit from plain language because you know sometimes résumés about showcasing you know your skill sets your accomplishment and so on. What's your thought on that? Yeah I mean I I've never I haven't I haven't approached rumés that way before but I certainly think it could. If you think about some of the strategies we were saying, if we're looking at an a candidate trying to uh sell themselves to an employer, you want the employer to be able to find the information easily, understand it, and use it to hopefully move you to that next step of getting an interview. Right? So, um, writing your resume in a way that you're taking out all those extras that I talked about that tends to clutter things out up, taking out a lot of those descriptive words that aren't necessary, using bulleted lists, making sure you have enough white space so employers can navigate, having headings, all of those strategies would apply well to um, to resumes. The flip side of that is I have seen plain language used when it comes to the employer side and job advertisements. So putting applying these strategies to job ads can make it much um easier for candidates who are a good fit to see themselves in that ad and then apply for those jobs. Right. So we only have a couple more minutes left. Um there's uh some questions that we may not be able to get to and I just want to let the audience know that if we didn't get to your questions uh you can certainly email it to us and we'll try to find a way to get back to you on that. But um just to wrap up though Rachel so um you know it's National Accessibility Week next week and uh it sounds like you know symbol language is going to benefit everyone. Um so what would your one major piece of kind of take away? How do we advocate plain language more broadly and and and and help the community to kind of get into this kind of practice? So, you had heard me talk at the beginning of the presentation a little bit about how, you know, plain language makes good business sense, right? We can make a business case for why plain language makes sense. It saves time. It saves energy. It saves money. And and that's all great. And I think that can be very helpful when we're talking to a particular audience and we're trying to kind of bring them on side to um to this idea of plain language. But I think at the end of the day, if we think about it in an accessibility perspective, um plain language is about having equal access to information, right? And so whether we're talking an employer context, we're talking about a health care setting, we're talking about a legal setting, everyone has the right to equal access to information. And plain language is one of the strate strategies that we use to make that happen. Um, and it's not a separate or a special strategy for a certain group of people. It's one of those universal, you know, universally designed, you know, good practices that can benefit um everyone in our country. So, I think um if I'm tying it back to accessibility, that would be my my pitch around how we uh you know, we we push this out and promote this to the broader community. Mhm. Well, that's wonderful, Rachel. And thank you for uh spending your time and um um with us today and and this is a lot of uh really practical uh things that you shared and I'm sure a lot of our um audience will appreciate this and and and resonate with um uh the concept that you've given us. So, um I want to thank you for taking your time being here again and um and I also want to thank the um the French interpreter that's been helping us out today too. Um for the audience, uh just a reminder that the recording of this session will be posted on our idea website when it becomes available. Um, in the meantime, if you have any questions um or even suggestions for future topics um or maybe you want to dive uh even more deeper into plain language and uh so certainly uh send us an email and let us know uh your interest and also follow us on social media as well too. Um so with that said and uh I will say goodbye to you for now and we'll see you in the next webinar.