Plain Language

By Kelsie Acton

Editor’s note: This article contains language that some readers may find offensive. While Impact generally strives to avoid such language, we feel it was necessary to include this context in discussing the importance of free expression to people with disabilities.

I write plain-language versions of disabled people’s* stories. I used to keep all their swears in these versions. Then I worked on a research project where swear words made it harder for artists with learning disabilities to engage with the project. This made me ask if keeping swears was helpful or creating more barriers.

Standardization, or having a usual way you do things, can be helpful. But standardization can’t serve everyone, and sometimes we create barriers that we don’t know about. I developed one approach to writing plain language, and then rethought it.

In 2023, I received an email from Alice Wong. The Alice Wong of Disability Visibility, sharer of disabled people’s stories and the undisputed queen of disability Twitter. The email asked if I was interested in writing the plain-language version of her forthcoming memoir, Year of the Tiger.

In many ways, Alice’s decision that her books were going to have plain-language versions was revolutionary. Plain language is vital access for people with intellectual and other developmental disabilities (IDD) and other access needs. After all, the opportunity for people with IDD to make decisions about their lives is meaningless unless they have the information they need to do that in a form that makes sense. But this information is usually just that, information. It’s practical and to the point. There’s no point of view, no personality, and no intended feeling.

Alice knew disabled people’s stories mattered. Often, society thinks that what matters is that non-disabled people hear disabled people’s stories. And it does. But Alice’s particular genius was knowing that it mattered more that disabled people heard other disabled people’s stories. So, she was going to make her work - her literary work, full of personality and feeling - accessible to people who needed plain language.

When I worked on that version of Year of the Tiger, I made a point of including every single swear. I wanted Alice’s voice to come through, even in plain language. Alice’s delight in language and delight in shocking people was part of the fabric of that book. And after years of working in disability dance spaces with artists with IDD, I was all too aware of the way they were often infantilised or policed into excessive politeness. I’d had an experience where one of the artists I worked with found it liberating to be in a space where they could swear. I felt proud of the decision to keep every one of Alice’s ‘fucks.’ I do a lot of access work, both plain language and other forms, where I have doubts about what I’m doing. But this particular access decision I felt confident about. It’s a decision that I’ve kept for every piece of literary plain-language writing that I’ve done since. In many ways, it’s become part of my standard approach to plain language.

Over the last few years, there’s been an increasing focus in the broader plain-language world on standards. In 2023, the International Standards Organization published its guidelines for plain language around the world. This year, the Government of Canada released its own guidelines for plain language. Standards and guidelines can be important to accessibility work. It’s easier to do access work if you are not reinventing how you do it each time. Importantly, one of the biggest barriers for people with disabilities is the unpredictability of the world. Even if the standards don’t work for you, at least they don’t work in a predictable way. But the downside to this is that a group of people is still consistently excluded. The other downside is that standards have very little space for nuance.

In 2023, I began to rethink my approach to literary plain language. I joined a research project called I’m Me, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, which brought together a network of learning disability arts organisations to investigate artists with learning disabilities and autism’s understandings of identity, representation, and voice. (In the UK, ‘people with learning disabilities’ is the chosen term for people with IDD.) The project used creative methods, sending out a book of creative prompts on each theme to each company. They would then choose which prompts they wanted to engage with, and use visual arts, drama, dance, and music to think together about the prompt. We would then interview each lead artist and lead facilitator about the process of working with that Doodle Book. The project culminated in a two-day festival, sharing art that the organisations had developed from the books.

The first Doodle Book contained a very small swear. We asked, ‘What pisses you off? ’ In our interviews, a couple of companies had flagged that the use of a swear had sparked a lot of discussion. Some of the artists were initially worried about the language and needed to talk through why language like that might be used. So, for the final Doodle Book on voice, we included the question, “What is shit in the world?” I understood both of these questions as an opportunity for artists to engage with, and create from, their anger – an emotion that people with IDD are sometimes encouraged not to express.

The responses to this relatively minor swear were more complicated. One company reported, “In the last book...someone took umbrage to there being a swear word in there, whereas, with this book everyone's really into it and getting into the swears a bit.” They talked about how swearing felt passionate, something that was appealing to performing artists. In another company, however, the lead artist told us that one of their artists “hated it.” The word was a barrier to engaging with the question.

I can’t know why this artist hated ‘shit’ so much. Everyone’s tastes in art are shaped by the society around us. Tastes and preferences of artists with IDD are often shaped by the ableism they encounter daily, including the assumption that they should not express anger and definitely should not swear to express anger. Or maybe this artist just hates that word. But does it matter if this artist didn’t engage with the question because he’d been infantilised and denied the opportunity to play with when and where swearing might be appropriate or pleasurably dangerous? It was still a barrier. He deserved access to that creative prompt. And if he’s interested, I would want him to have access to Alice’s work. Disabled people deserve access to other disabled people’s stories.

In arts access work, there’s often a lot of discussion about what equality of experience means. How do you preserve not just the information that a piece of art conveys, but the full, felt experience the artist intended? In a dream world, when I write plain language, I would know each and every person I was writing for. I could personalise the plain language to everyone to remove as many barriers as possible. If I were to rewrite Year of the Tiger, I might now make two versions - a version with Alice’s delightful, irreverent approach to swearing and a version that eliminated that aspect of Alice’s voice but allowed access for people for whom that is a barrier. Knowing your audience, more than any well-intentioned standardization, is the key to creating useful, meaningful plain language.