Making Ends Meet: 'The multiplier effect'

Finding multiple audiences for different formats saves time, money and can reach more of your audiences without creating more than one publication. For example, why should a Plain English version or an illustrated version appeal solely to people with low literacy levels? next >

CASE STUDY — A Guide To Breast Screening (created for BreastCheck, The National Breast Screening Programme)

Brief & requirements
BreastCheck is a Government-funded service that offers free breast screening to all women between the ages of 50 and 64. The aim of BreastCheck is to reduce the number of deaths from breast cancer by finding and treating the disease at an early stage. Language was asked by BreastCheck to create A Guide to Breast Screening to explain mammography and breast health to women with intellectual disabilities; it was to explain to them and their carers or relatives how the procedure worked; and how best to prepare for the screening.

Our solution
The text was written as Easy To Read and each piece of text has an accompanying self-explanatory illustration, which tells the same story as the text. Both text and images were tested on a group of women with intellectual disabilities and their carers (and elements of both text and images were revised as a result of the testing). Creating the document as an A5 ringbinder meant individual pages could be amended/reprinted without incurring unnecessary cost. Because the text was written as Easy To Read and the images used for story-telling, not just for ‘visual interest’, the Guide has also worked really well for women with low literacy levels and has also proved vital in explaining BreastCheck to women with little or no English language skills.