The *real* role of plain English in products
You’ve heard of plain English, and you know we should use it to communicate in digital products.
But if you’re like many of the designers and product people I meet, you might not actually think plain English is that big a deal. Even if you do, you probably don’t know what makes plain English plain. That’s fine: you’re probably not a professional writer either.
But if you own or manage a digital product, you need to take plain English seriously.
The reason why is explored in this article on the Access + Ability exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
About halfway through that piece, Head Curator Cara McCarty explains how research on an accessible voting booth showed touch screens worked best for voters with cerebral palsy… and, it turned out, everyone else.
Think about the last time you voted. In my case, the voting form was far wider than the booth. The pencil had been ground down to quite a short little stub and, to be honest, I don’t have great dexterity in my fingers. I wouldn’t consider myself disabled, but… Would a touch screen have helped me? Yes, it would.
McCarty says people pushing prams have similar building-accessibility needs to a person in a wheelchair. And Walei Sabry, who works for the NY City Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities, points out that “disability will affect everyone at one point or another in their lives,” whether it’s as you age or because you sustain an injury.
Indeed, disability needn’t be long-term or permanent, or identified as such by the sufferer, for us to need a more empathetic design than is usually made for people without disability.
So what does this mean for products, and plain English?
Accessibility isn’t about difference, despite what you might have read about it.
It’s about what’s common among people.
Accessibility focuses on what’s foundational in humans. So it champions the fact that most of us want to spend as little energy as possible getting things done with digital products. And for products where we do want to spend energy and time (like games or ereaders), we want to be comfortable using them for extended periods.
Correspondingly, plain English aims to be understandable by as many English-speakers as possible, even if it’s not their first language. Plain English focuses on the most common words and grammatical usages within an audience — the kind of expression they are able to understand most easily. And that’s important for one other reason.
“Ability” depends on context.
A person with three young kids trying to do the family’s grocery shopping online probably has greater “ability” if they’re doing it away from the real-time distractions and demands of those kids — while they’re at school or daycare, for example. An Australian with a PhD in English, who only speaks that language, has severely lower “ability” if they’re trying to use a map to navigate a city in Japan.
This is why the accessibility of digital products — including plain English — isn’t optional. What I’m able to understand fairly easily today might bewilder me tomorrow.
So when it comes to language, near enough isn’t good enough.
Recently I spoke with a Health Literacy Manager at a major hospital in Melbourne who identified risk as the critical issue in ensuring clear communication. We were talking about respectful writing, and that, of course, includes issues like cognitive processing and linguistic ability, as well as life history, unique personal experience, and continual learning.
But, as she pointed out, risk of miscommunication exists in every communication, with everybody.
Products do not serve users who cannot understand, in that moment, what those products direct them to do. But you don’t have to have a low cognitive processing level to be baffled by some part of a digital product. All you need is a bad day, a short temper, limited time, or a distraction.
Ultimately, good product design is pointless without plain English microcopy.
