URN:NBN:fi:tsv-oa148662 DOI: 10.11143/fennia.148662 Reflections Using easy read formats in geography DANIEL P. JONES Jones, D. P. (2024) Using easy read formats in geography. Fennia 202(2) XXX–XXX. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.148662 About this paper © 2025 by the author. This open access article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This paper has been written for 'Fennia', an academic journal of Geography. This paper is in Easy Read. Easy Read makes information accessible for people with Learning Disabilities. We do this by using Plain English and pictures. Jones, D. P. (2024) Using easy read formats in geography. Fennia 202(2) 326 – 333. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.148662 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.148662 2 FENNIA 202(2) (2024)Reflections This paper will encourage people to consider creating an easy-read format of their work as a first step. The aim of creating an easy-read document is to make academic work more inclusive. Images for this document have been created through the use of PhotoSymbols, and through collecting institutional photographs of relevant employees. Daniel P. Jones is the author of this easy-read document. If you have thoughts or would like to discuss this, you can email him. His email address is at daniel.jones2@sheffield.ac.uk Daniel P. Jones (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8208-162X), Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom. E-mail: daniel.jones2@sheffield.ac.uk 327 FENNIA 202(2) (2024) 3Daniel P. Jones Main content Geography is an area of research that has done a lot of work about accessibility and inclusivity. There are many examples of this. One good example was a book chapter written about how to make teaching in geography more accessible at university. This was written by Annie Hughes and Nona McDuff in 2019. Most academic writing is in the format of long- form text. This can be confusing for people. Using complicated formats can make people feel excluded from research. People prefer to publish their work as ‘Open Access’, which means that anybody can see the work. You do not need to buy the paper to read it. This is considered as a good way to improve the accessibility of academic work. 328 4 FENNIA 202(2) (2024)Reflections Some people have included ‘Plain Language Summaries’ of their work in the published paper, such as Marlene Stoll and her colleagues (2022). They write about the value of plain language summaries! Some researchers have created Easy-Read versions of their work after publishing longer and more complicated versions. Easy-Read documents focus on making words large, easy-to- read, and with a relevant image next to them. An example of this is Antonios Ktenidis and others (2023) who wrote a guide on organising accessible events at university. The team created an Easy-Read guide afterwards. Until this article, there has been no published academic work that uses an Easy-Read format as a first step in sharing research. This paper shows an example of how to do this and why it is a good idea. 329 FENNIA 202(2) (2024) 5Daniel P. Jones A field of study called ‘Crip Studies’ has asked the question “How can we crip academic work?”. Crip means to make something more accessible, and to challenge ableism. One idea that crip studies has is to not take an individual approach to accessibility. This means that the goal is to make things accessible for everybody instead of making changes for one person. If we care about inclusivity in academia, we need to ‘crip’ our work in different formats. One example might be creating Easy-Read publications before writing complicated papers. Making Easy-Read publications can make us think about being inclusive from the start. Inclusion and access should not only be thought about afterwards. We should centre disabled people in our disability work (Jones & Gauthier- Mamaril 2024). 330 6 FENNIA 202(2) (2024)Reflections Using Easy-Read publications as a priority makes us think about who is welcome in academic spaces. We can ask questions like ‘Who do we think has important ideas?’ and ‘Who can do research?’ As an example, movements like ‘Nothing About Us Without Us’ say we should meaningfully include disabled people in our research on disability (see Gonzalez 2018). Geography as an area of study has been interested in disability for a long time. An example of this is the work of Edward Hall and Robert Wilton (2017) who write about doing disability research. If we want to include disabled people in geography, this should also include the papers we write. How do we make research papers more accessible? 331 FENNIA 202(2) (2024) 7Daniel P. Jones Creating easy-read guides like this might be one solution. Creating easy-read guides as a main part of writing about research might encourage us to think more about accessibility. There are many ways to make easy-read documents, but it takes practice. This easy-read paper encourages everybody to have a go at making these documents, and ask ourselves ‘who is welcome in geography’? Gonzalez, C. (2018) Urban ethnography: nothing about us without us is for us. In Pardo, I. & Prato, G. B. (eds.) The Palgrave Handbook of Urban Ethnography, 387–404. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64289-5_22 Hall, E. & Wilton, R. (2017) Towards a relational geography of disability. Progress in Human Geography 41(6) 727–744. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132516659705 Hughes, A. & McDuff, N. (2019) Inclusive teaching and learning practices in geography. In Walkington, H., Hill, J. & Dyer, S. (eds.) Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Geography, 168–182. Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, Cheltenham. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788116497.00022 References 332 8 FENNIA 202(2) (2024)Reflections Jones, D. P. & Guathier-Mamaril, É. (2024) Missive from the accommodations loop: a response from the UK. iHuman, University of Sheffield. https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/ihuman/waarc/missive- accommodations-loop 09.12.2024. Ktenidis, A., Adelaine, A., Fischer, N., Hassan, T., Martin, J.-M. & Mason, A. (2023) Accessibility guide for university led events. [Report] University of Sheffield. https://equityinclusionsheffield.co. uk/wp-content/uploads/woocommerce_uploads/2023/10/ Accessibility-Guidebook-V2-2-5xtzk5.pdf 09.12.2024. Stoll, M., Kerwer, M., Lieb, K. & Chasiotis, A. (2022) Plain language summaries: a systematic review of theory, guidelines and empirical research. PLoS One 17(6) e026789. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268789 333