To the individual

Our daily lives include many essential activities, some simple, others more complicated:

• reading and understanding voting instructions;
• doing homework with our children;
• reading notes and instructions from their school;
• dealing with banking information;
• reading the instructions on a bottle of medicine;
• reading instructions at work on how to operate machinery, understanding manuals, reading and employing safety and emergency procedures;
• finding or applying for a job;
• reading forms and filling them in to apply for birth certificates, passports;
• reading a lease or a car rental agreement;
• studying for a written exam for a driver’s licence;
• reading the newspaper to find out about job opportunities, the weather, sports, health issues, political issues.

Not being able to fully understand what they read makes every day a challenge for those with low literacy skills.

Inadequate literacy skills put a stop to further education, make it harder to get a job, make it difficult to participate fully in the community, and sometimes block access to justice. The Lawyers for Literacy project in British Columbia describes how low literacy often prevents clients from pursuing legal remedies. It can also interfere with lawyers’ “ability to obtain the appropriate remedy.”¹⁸

18. Lawyers for Literacy, British Columbia Branch of the Canadian Bar Association, Communicating Clearly, How To Recognize When Your Client Doesn’t Understand and How You Can Help (www.plainlanguagenetwork.org/LawyersForLiteracy/Booklet/index.html).