Swindon Borough Council has developed a generative AI application to convert complex documents into an Easy Read format to help people with learning disabilities understand the information.
Named Simply Readable, its main purpose is to enable them to know what they need to and make decisions about important issues in their lives.
Easy Read presents information in short, jargon-free sentences, often with clear images to explain the content.
The new Simply Readable solution is powered by AWS and has been built on the Amazon Bedrock managed service for generative AI applications with foundation models. It uses two large language models – Anthropic’s Claude 2 for analysing and summarising documents and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion for producing images from text and prompts – and a council team will maintain oversight of the outputs, amending them where needed.
It can be translated into 75 languages and there are hopes it could also be used to support people with low literacy levels and cognitive impairments.
A local volunteer focus group, Experts by Experience of a Learning Disability, whose members have a range of learning disabilities, has also been involved in the development.
Quicker and cheaper
The application is said to produce simplified text from a document within seconds, and at an average cost of less than 10 pence per A4 page compared with £120 when using a standard Easy Read service. The process takes longer if images are involved.
Sarah Peña, head of Swindon’s emerging technology team, said: “The Experts by Experience group were absolutely fantastic and opened our eyes to their world.
“Imagine facing barriers with making everyday decisions about your life? You want to move into a flat but cannot understand the tenancy agreement or you missed a dentist’s appointment because it wasn’t clear to you when you should be there.
“And how would you feel if someone opened letters addressed to you because they think you won’t understand them? These are common challenges that millions of people face across the world, so we wanted to find a solution that can overcome that problem and make people’s lives easier.”
Aiming for inclusivity
Cllr Emma Bushell, Swindon’s deputy leader, commented: “We believe that technology can be a force for good and accessibility is at the heart of that vision.
“With the development of Simply Readable we’re taking a leap towards creating a more inclusive world, where everyone has equal access to information and opportunities.”
Swindon has indicated that the solution will initially be used only for documents that do not contain personalised identifiable information, but that it will look at the possibility of doing so in the future.
It is also planning to make it available on an open source, licence-free basis through GitHub around the end of January.
