Läsarperspektiv på läsning av lättlästa myndighetstexter

Reading Easy Language public authority texts. Reader perspectives. More and more public authority information is only available online as services become increasingly digitized. This development also concerns Easy Language texts. This qualitative study investigated the reading of Easy Language texts written by public authorities among readers in a day centre for people with intellectual disabilities, with focus on what the readers recalled and how they reacted. The analysis method consisted of qualitative content analysis with a conventional approach (Hsieh & Shannon 2005) and included deriving codes according to key content in the material and sorting key content into categories. The results showed that the participants mainly recalled details or single words of most of the texts, and that the participants’ perceptions of their own comprehension were linked to reactions such as performance anxiety, information related to the participants’ private life and text evaluation. The results also showed a link between prior knowledge and apparent comprehension and between word-level characteristics in the texts – such as amount of abstract nouns, infrequent words and extra long words – and apparent comprehension.