Supporting people with learning disabilities

Scottish Learning Disability Week (Monday 1 – Sunday 7 May 2023) is an annual event celebrating the contribution that people with learning disabilities make to society. This year’s theme is ‘Lead to Change’.

One of our key principles is making sure people can access and understand all the information relating to our benefits. When designing our service with input from the people who use it, we wanted to ensure that our processes and ways of communicating could be adapted to meet the wide-ranging needs of our clients.

We identified Easy Read as a solution to help our clients to engage with our materials in a format best suited to them. Easy Read is an accessible information format designed specifically for people with learning disabilities. It uses short and simple language, has a reduced document length, and contains pictures that support the words to help the reader engage and understand the document.

Easy Read is not just used to make information more accessible to people with learning disabilities, but also has added benefits of assisting people with communication difficulties. There are a number of reasons people may have communication difficulties including dyslexia, brain injury, cognitive impairment, hearing impairment, or people whose first language is not English.

Information on our benefits is proactively adapted into Easy Read, which can be accessed via the stakeholder resources section of our website. Other information for our clients, like letters and notifications, are also available in Easy Read if requested. By providing our information in accessible formats, we reduce barriers and promote inclusion, as well as empower people with learning disabilities to make informed decisions and take control of their lives.

To find out more about Scottish Learning Disability Week, and how you can support, visit the Scottish Commission for People with Learning Disabilities website.