Easy Read for Community Groups: 3 Critical Fixes
askVERA · Faith & Community Organisations
Easy Read for Community Groups: 3 Critical Fixes
A committee doesn’t need to lose a member to a badly worded notice to know something isn’t working. It usually just doesn’t find out.
A community centre’s monthly newsletter goes out by email and gets pinned to the noticeboard: a room booking change, a small increase to the hire fee, a reminder that the safeguarding policy is under review. Most members skim it and move on. One long-standing volunteer in her seventies reads it twice and still isn’t sure what actually changed. Another member, who speaks English as a second language, assumes the fee increase starts next month rather than next week and turns up with the wrong amount. Neither complains. Both simply start coming a little less often.
Faith groups, community centres, mutual aid networks and voluntary associations run on exactly this kind of routine communication: notices, newsletters, consent forms, safeguarding updates, AGM papers. None of it looks like a compliance document. All of it quietly decides who understands what is actually happening in their own community, and who is left guessing.
Easy read for community groups is not about producing one polished leaflet a year for a funding bid or an open day. It is about making the routine stuff, the notice on the door, the newsletter in the inbox, understandable to everyone who receives it, not only the members with the time, confidence or literacy to work through dense text.
Why easy read for community groups matters more than committees expect
The scale of the gap is easy to underestimate. In England, 18 per cent of adults aged 16 to 65, roughly 6.6 million people, have what the National Literacy Trust describes as very poor literacy skills: enough to manage short, familiar text but not enough to reliably follow anything longer or less familiar. Add members who are older, who have a learning disability, or who are more confident speaking English than reading it, and most committees are communicating with a genuinely mixed audience every single time they send anything out.
Community and voluntary organisations are not exempt from the Equality Act 2010 simply because they are informal, unfunded or run by volunteers. The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s own guidance for the sector is direct: any organisation providing a service to the public has to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people, and the duty is anticipatory rather than reactive. Its own worked example describes a voluntary organisation that makes sure its leaflets are simply written, with pictures to illustrate what the leaflets say, precisely because that is likely to make them more accessible to someone with a learning disability.
Easy read for community groups, in other words, is not a nice extra reserved for large charities with a communications budget. It is what the same duty asks of a five-person committee running a weekly drop-in, just applied at a much smaller scale.
Three places easy read for community groups breaks down
The failures rarely come from anyone being careless. They come from a sensible instinct applied unevenly.
- The “important” document gets simplified. The routine one doesn’t. A welcome pack might exist in an accessible version somewhere. The one-off notice about a hall closure, a new collection time or a fee change usually doesn’t, because nobody treats it as important enough to convert.
- One volunteer becomes the unofficial translator. Someone on the committee ends up on the phone explaining what a letter actually meant, for whichever members happen to ask. That works until they are unavailable, and it never reaches the members too unsure, or too polite, to ask in the first place.
- Nobody notices until attendance quietly drops. A missed deadline or a misunderstood change rarely produces a complaint. It produces someone attending a little less, then not at all, and few committees trace a thinning group back to a letter nobody could actually follow.
How askVERA supports easy read for community groups
askVERA gives a committee a way to convert routine communications, newsletters, notices, consent forms, AGM papers, into Easy Read or plain language versions in minutes rather than handing the job to whichever volunteer happens to have a free evening.
Because the process runs through software rather than a fresh commission each time it is needed, a five-person committee producing four notices a year and a larger federation producing forty can use the same workflow: upload the source text, get a draft back quickly, and have a named volunteer check it reads true before it goes out. That review step matters as much as the conversion itself; nobody is suggesting a machine should have the final word on tone or accuracy for a community that trusts a committee to get it right. Designing for people with significant accessibility needs benefits everyone, whatever the size of the organisation doing the designing.
In a faith setting specifically, that might mean a notice about a change to service times reaching an elderly congregant in the same sitting as everyone else, rather than via a phone call three days later once someone realises she missed it. In a community centre, it might mean a fee change landing clearly enough that nobody turns up with the wrong amount and feels embarrassed about it in front of other members.
A committee does not need a communications department to get this right. It needs one working, reviewed process for turning routine notices into something every member can actually follow, and the discipline to run every notice through it, not just the ones that feel important enough to bother with.
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