The UK Easy Read Standards were published on 1 October 2026. An Easy Read version is planned for 2027. We did not think people should have to wait, so we have made one now. It is free, it works with screen readers, there is an audio version, and anyone can share it.
A standard everyone can read
The UK Easy Read Standards Working Group has set out, in 60 pages, how good Easy Read should be made. It is a serious piece of work and we support it. But a standard about Easy Read that the people it is for cannot read has a gap in the middle of it. Our guide fills that gap until the official Easy Read version arrives.
The guide is 18 pages long. It follows the same five parts as the standards, in the same order and with the same names, so you can hold the two documents side by side: Words, Sentences, Text, The whole document and Pictures and logos. Every rule is shown with an example, and the photographs are of real people with learning disabilities from the Photosymbols Library.
I wrote and designed it by hand over one weekend. I have been making Easy Read for 35 years, and I think it is a good piece of Easy Read in its own right, as well as a fair reflection of what the standards say.
Made to be read by everyone
Many people who use Easy Read listen to it rather than read it. So the PDF is fully tagged, with proper headings, bookmarks and a reading order that follows the page. We checked it with axesCheck, an independent accessibility checker, and it passed both the PDF/UA and WCAG tests with no failures. If you use a screen reader, it should simply work.
There is also an audio version of the whole guide. It follows the printed pages, so you can listen and look at the same time, or just listen.
We support the UK Easy Read Standards
Photosymbols published its own Easy Read Standard in January 2026. The two documents agree on almost everything. Where they differed, we have changed ours to match: pictures at least 5 centimetres wide, and most sentences up to 15 words.
We are not precious about who wrote a rule. We care whether it helps the reader.
We have done this before
In 2020, when the country shut down and the information about it arrived in forms most people with learning disabilities could not use, we built keepsafe.org.uk: free Easy Read posters, audio and web pages, made quickly, because people needed them then and not later. This guide was made in the same spirit. When something affects people with learning disabilities, the information about it should reach them at the same time as everyone else.
The thinking behind the guide
Making an Easy Read version of a set of Easy Read standards turns out to be a good test of the standards themselves. I have written a set of creator’s notes alongside the guide: why I made it, how it was made, where the rules met the page and something had to give, and what I would offer the Working Group for the next version. If you design, write or commission Easy Read, I think it is worth twenty minutes of your time.
