Looking for Literacy Barriers

The Literacy Audit

Over time, looking for literacy barriers in an organization can become an automatic process. When staff and volunteers get used to working in ways that enable people with low or no literacy skills to use an organization's services in comfort, they can spot troublesome practices and excessive literacy demands more easily. Until that point of continuous review is reached, occasional literacy audits can uncover literacy barriers.

A literacy audit is like an organizational or program audit, in that it involves systematically reviewing all elements of an organization's operations to assess the extent to which it is literacy sensitive. A literacy audit can help you spot literacy barriers, such as unnecessary forms, and help you identify opportunities to promote literacy training among the people who use your programs and services. Each section of this handbook can assist your organization in analyzing your programs, procedures or paperwork to improve their accessibility and sensitivity to literacy.

Before you do your first literacy audit, you may find it helpful to consult with a representative of a literacy organization in your area.

By describing your service, the people who use it, and your procedures to a literacy professional you may get some useful guidelines and suggestions on where to look for barriers and on how to remove them. If a literacy worker or someone who is taking a literacy-upgrading program can visit your organization, he or she may help you to see your offices and processes with new, literacy-aware eyes.

What is Your Literacy Quotient?

There are six main areas of your organization that can be reviewed in a literacy audit. You might choose to concentrate on one, several or all of these areas at a time. Through a literacy audit, you can assess your organization's literacy quotient by systematically reviewing:

• how you set up your offices;
• how you communicate;
• how you do your work;
• how you train your staff;
• how you can refer people to literacy- upgrading programs;
• how you can work with other agencies concerned with literacy.

The following sections of this handbook can help you do a literacy audit of your organization. You may choose from a series of ideas and suggestions to improve your agency's literacy quotient. Achieving awareness and sensitivity to literacy in an organization's programs, policies and procedures takes time.

There are no magic solutions. You know your organization best. The ideas in this book can assist you to develop solutions that are tailor made to respond to your agency's literacy challenges.