Accessible information shouldn’t take weeks. With askVERA, it takes minutes.
Accessibility · Document Processing
Create Easy Read Documents in 5 Minutes with askVERA
Easy Read documents shouldn't take weeks to produce. askVERA simplifies any PDF or Word file into accessible content in about five minutes.
If you've ever had to produce an Easy Read version of a document, you'll know the drill. You brief a specialist writer. You wait. You get a draft back that needs another round of review. By the time it's signed off, days or even weeks have gone by, and the person who needed it in an accessible format has usually already missed whatever it was for. askelie built askVERA to close that gap.
How askVERA Creates Easy Read Documents
askVERA takes any PDF or Word file and turns it into a clear, well-structured Easy Read document in about five minutes. No specialist writers to brief, no lengthy turnaround, no back-and-forth over wording. You upload the original, and askVERA does the heavy lifting: simplifying language, breaking down complex sentences, adding supporting images, and structuring the content in a way that's genuinely easier to follow. The result is a set of Easy Read documents that read like they were written by a trained specialist, not a generic summary tool.
It runs on ELIE (Ever Learning Intelligent Engine), the platform underneath all of askelie's products, which means it keeps learning and improving the more it's used. Every document is also checked against a recognised standard, so you're not just getting shorter text, you're getting easy read software that scores each document against the EU Easy Read Guidelines and shows you exactly which checks pass before you share it.
Why this matters
Easy Read isn't a nice-to-have. It's a genuine accessibility need for a huge range of people, including those with learning disabilities, cognitive impairments, or anyone who simply finds standard documents hard to process. The scale of that need is bigger than most organisations realise: the National Literacy Trust estimates that around 18% of adults in England, roughly 6.6 million people, have very poor literacy skills, enough to manage short, familiar text but not enough to reliably follow an unfamiliar letter, policy or form.
Organisations have a responsibility to provide accessible information, but the traditional route to producing it is slow and expensive, which means it often doesn't happen at all, or only happens for a handful of priority documents. In the UK, this isn't just good practice, it's a legal expectation. The Equality Act 2010 requires organisations to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people, and NHS and social care providers are specifically required to meet the Accessible Information Standard, which sets out how information must be provided in formats people can actually understand, including Easy Read.
By cutting the time from days to minutes, askVERA makes it realistic to produce Easy Read versions of far more of your content: policies, letters, guidance, forms, the everyday documents that people actually need in an accessible format, not just the ones that make it to the top of a backlog.
Built to a real accessibility standard
A lot of tools promise to "simplify" text, but simpler isn't the same as accessible. askVERA is built around the actual Easy Read standard, and the platform itself is designed to meet WCAG 2.2, the current Web Content Accessibility Guidelines published by the W3C. That matters for two reasons: it means the tool you're using is accessible in its own right, and it means the documents it produces are held to a standard that's recognised, not just a general impression of "easier to read."
Where Easy Read Documents Make the Biggest Difference
The need for Easy Read documents shows up in more places than most teams expect. Councils use them to turn consultation documents and service letters into something residents can actually act on. Housing providers rely on Easy Read documents for tenant-facing policies and repair notices, as covered in our piece on askVERA for housing associations. Charities and community organisations lean on them too, for exactly the reasons we set out in how askVERA helps charities make every message accessible. In every case, the underlying problem is the same: important information exists, but it's not in a format everyone can use.
How it works
- Upload your document. PDF or Word, whatever you've already got.
- askVERA processes it. The content is simplified and restructured for Easy Read, with supporting images added where they help understanding.
- Review your output. You get a clear, accessible document with a compliance score against the EU Easy Read Guidelines, ready to use, in about five minutes.
There's no need to start from scratch, and no need to wait on a specialist's availability. A named reviewer can still check the output before it goes out, but the heavy lifting, the actual rewriting, is already done.
Try it for free
If you've got a document sitting in a queue waiting to be made accessible, it's worth seeing what askVERA can do with it. Give it a try and see how quickly you can turn a standard document into something genuinely Easy Read.
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