In my experience most people who have disabilities are quite capable of reading and understanding. The difference is that they may read or comprehend differently from people without "print-handicaps". A person who is blind may not be able to see my Web page, but that's not a problem if the information is converted to spoken form or perhaps Braille. A person who is deaf or hard of hearing may get nothing from an audio clip of a politician's speech, but that barrier disappears if I provide a text-transcript of the speech, or visual captioning.

What if my visitor can't read... perhaps because of a reading disability, perhaps illiteracy, or simply doesn't read the language of my site? Well, the text-to-speech technology used by someone who is blind will work just as well here. Similarly, someone who can read the language but has difficulty comprehending the spoken word could benefit from having equivalent textual content.

But a far more common problem is that a lot of the content published on the Web is simply incomprehensible: and not just to people who have cognitive disabilities, or educational or literacy limitations. I am most familiar with government Web sites and, well... do I really have to say anything to you folks about the quality of the majority of public sector content? But, given the nature and background of most Web content providers, I suppose this is not surprising: few are professional writers, and fewer still are plain language professionals.

PLAIN Language guidelines and checkpoints

Most of the WCAG guidelines are intended to overcome technological barriers faced by people with certain functional limitations. How can we make text available to someone who can't see? How can we make audio content available to someone who can't hear? How can we make it possible to surf the Web for someone who can't use a mouse? Those are all pretty easy in one sense. But the question of how to make the content or topic of a document understandable by someone who for whatever reason doesn't understand it is not, in my experience, a technological question.

From the beginning, we realized that we had two problems: we had to identify and overcome the technological barriers to using the Web (and we have, by and large, done so) and we had to address the barriers to understanding. Even the very first guidelines made some mention of the need for "plain language". Granted, we were most concerned with ensuring that Web content was understandable by people with learning or cognitive disabilities, but, in my circles, we have a saying:

"Anything that makes the Web easier for someone with a disability makes it easier for everyone."

So, what did the guideline say? It said:

Ensure that documents are clear and simple so they may be more easily understood.