In an increasingly digital world, access to information is an even more important right. Despite this, for many people, barriers in written communication are still an everyday reality. With this issue in mind, the II Colloquium on text revision, organized by the Center for Human Sciences, Arts and Letters (CCHLA/UFRN) and the UFRN Publishing House (EDUFRN), brought the mini-course “Textual Accessibility: principles and practices”. The lecture welcomed teachers, students and researchers and was given by professor José Muniz, from the Federal Center for Technological Education of Minas Gerais (CEFET/MG), on the afternoon of this Wednesday, 13th, at Instituto Ágora.
Maria* (fictional character) is an elderly person and, like many others in her age group, suffers from difficulty reading the leaflet of her own medicine, due to the long text and small font, which causes her frustration and a feeling of incapacity. Linguistics strategies can solve problems like those faced by Maria, which concern the population with vision difficulties, low education, people with disabilities and refugees. During the lecture, several principles were presented to make a text accessible and easy to understand, applicable to all textual genres, through simple language.
Concern about the target audience of the text was the main issue addressed in the short course. For José Muniz, simple language is an exercise in empathy. “By putting themselves in the shoes of a person who is not very proficient in reading, the professional guarantees greater readability for all stakeholders”. Replacing abstract nouns with verbs, more readable fonts, use of connectives and common words were some of the strategies recommended by the teacher.
Captions of works exhibited in museums in Minas Gerais were analyzed during the class. From the examples, the public was able to identify the reasons why some texts are not readable to the public. The lack of simpler lexical structures, the location of the work, the use of difficult-to-understand words and long sentences made the exemplified texts inaccessible.
The study of memory and the perception of how the reader's repertoire contributes to the interpretation of the text were covered during the event. The head of the Text Review Sector at Editora da UFRN (EDUFRN), Wildson Confessor, highlights the relevance of the event. "Textual accessibility is a topic that is in vogue, which advocates that texts need to be accessible to readers. The common, non-specialized reader can also understand what is being covered in the text."
Journalism student Guilherme Garcia is a person who has Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and says that this audience also experiences difficulties with access to reading. "I know people who have difficulty. The importance of reading for an autistic person is also very crucial", he describes. As a future journalist, Guilherme reveals his dream of increasing accessibility for this community. “My goal as a journalist is to defend inclusion.”
The action teaches writers how to expand the democratization of higher education, reduce functional illiteracy rates and solve demands for inclusion and accessibility. To achieve this, professionals will aim to focus on people with less proficiency in reading, who need to read to obtain information and make important decisions.
The event
The Text Review Colloquium is an annual extension event, open to the entire academic community interested in text review as a professional activity, and to external audiences interested in text review. In this edition, the colloquium addressed topics such as the publishing market, Artificial Intelligence, the publication production chain, as well as textual accessibility in conference, round table and mini-course formats. The event took place between the 12th and 14th of November.
Speaker José Muniz is a specialist in textual accessibility Photo – Cláudia Del Picchia
Doctors Wildson Confessor and Karla Oliveira were in charge of organizing the event. Photo – Cláudia Del Picchia
