Plain Language Is an Accessibility Fix You Can Ship This Week

ClearPath Team · 2026-09-29 · 6 min read

Most accessibility work needs a developer. Fixing a keyboard trap, labeling a form, repairing a focus style: all of it means opening the code. Plain language is different. It's one of the few accessibility improvements a marketer, a founder or a support lead can make on their own, in a normal CMS, this week.

It's also one of the most overlooked, because nobody runs a scanner and gets an error that says "your sentences are too long".

Who you're writing for

Here's the number that changed how we think about copy. In the 2023 round of the international adult skills survey known as PIAAC, results released by the US National Center for Education Statistics in December 2024, 28 percent of US adults scored at or below Level 1 in literacy. That was up from 19 percent in 2017. At that level, people can handle short, simple texts, but longer passages with dense vocabulary are a real struggle.

Add everyone else who benefits from clear writing: people with dyslexia, ADHD, memory impairments or brain injuries, people reading in their second or third language, older visitors, and anyone reading your checkout page on a phone while a toddler pulls on their sleeve. That isn't a niche. It's a large share of your traffic.

What WCAG says about it

WCAG does address reading level, in success criterion 3.1.5 Reading Level. It says that when text needs reading ability beyond lower secondary education, roughly nine years of school, you should provide supplementary content that doesn't. That criterion is Level AAA, so it isn't part of the AA target most laws point to.

Don't read too much into that. AAA criteria are often left out because they're hard to apply to every page of every site, not because they don't matter. And several AA criteria depend on clear writing anyway: error messages need to explain what went wrong (3.3.1 and 3.3.3), labels and instructions need to make sense (3.3.2), and headings need to describe the section below them (2.4.6). Vague, jargon-heavy copy makes all of those harder to meet.

Rewrites that make the biggest difference

You don't need to dumb anything down. You need to stop making the reader do work you could have done for them.

• Lead with the point. Put the answer in the first sentence, then the detail. Many visitors will only read that first line.
• Shorten sentences. Aim for an average around 15 to 20 words. If a sentence has three commas and a semicolon, it's probably two sentences.
• Use the words your customers use. "Cancel your plan", not "terminate your subscription agreement". Check your support tickets for the words people actually type.
• Write in the active voice. "We'll email your receipt" is clearer than "A receipt will be issued".
• Break up walls of text. Use descriptive headings, short paragraphs and lists. People scan before they read.
• Make error messages useful. "Invalid input" tells nobody anything. "Enter your phone number with the area code, for example 212 555 0100" does.
• Explain the jargon you can't avoid. If you have to say "VPAT" or "deductible", explain it in plain words the first time.

A readability checker built into most writing tools will give you a grade level. Treat it as a smoke alarm rather than a target. A score around grade 8 is a reasonable goal for general web copy, but the real test is whether a customer can do what they came to do.

Where to start

Don't try to rewrite the whole site. Pick the pages where confusion costs you money or support time:

1. Checkout, signup and any form with error messages.
2. Pricing and plan comparison pages.
3. Your returns, cancellation or refund policy.
4. The top five pages from your help center.

Rewrite those, then watch what happens to support tickets and form completion. Plain language is one of the rare accessibility fixes with a result you can usually see in your own numbers. If you run ClearPath, its reading tools are a useful companion to this work, but the rewrite is still the part that moves those numbers.

Helping visitors read what's already there

Rewriting takes time, and some content, like legal terms, can only get so simple. In the meantime, readers who find dense text hard can get support on their side of the screen. ClearPath gives visitors a dyslexia-friendly font, extra letter and line spacing, a reading guide and a reading mask that dims everything except the line they're on. Its dictionary tool looks up any word a visitor double-clicks, and its Cognitive and ADHD Focus profiles switch on a helpful set of these with one click.

Pick one page this week. Read it out loud. Wherever you stumble, your visitors are stumbling too. Fix those sentences, and you've shipped an accessibility improvement without opening a single file of code.