Title
Are easy language websites greener?
Conference name
Green Digital Accessibility
City
Country
Spain
Modalities
Date
02/12/2022
Abstract
In 2020, Spanish people spent 6 hours a day online on average [1, 2]. We have grown into digitalisation more and more since the invention and popularisation of the Internet, highlighting some challenges that we need to overcome. Accordingly, when pursuing a sustainable and inclusive society, some milestones need to be reached. Finding ways to make our digital environment more sustainable and inclusive is one of them. There are several recommendations that website developers can follow to make their site more sustainable [3, 4], as well as resources they can use to calculate their site’s carbon footprint [5] or overall eco-friendliness [6]. At the same time, we can also find numerous guidelines on how to make digital content more accessible. Suggestions in W3C Accessibility Guidelines [7] aim to make websites usable for everyone. Accessibility can be achieved by means of different services and resources, and one of them is Easy Language.
For a website to be fully accessible, its content needs to be easy to understand, and linguistic simplification through the adaptation of the text to Easy Language can improve any site’s comprehensibility. Several guidelines explain how to write in this simplified language variety, and a few of them focus on the adaptation of website content [8, 9, 10]. We have observed that these two types of adaptations (to boost sustainability and enhance comprehensibility) present a relationship of correlation. Websites that have been adapted to Easy Language tend to score better in carbon and eco-friendliness calculators. This descriptive study of the relationship between website sustainability recommendations and Easy Language guidelines aims to find a common ground that explains why Easy Language websites tend to be greener. With it, we want to show how in this case, like in many others, accessibility and sustainability can be mutually enriching allies [11].
For a website to be fully accessible, its content needs to be easy to understand, and linguistic simplification through the adaptation of the text to Easy Language can improve any site’s comprehensibility. Several guidelines explain how to write in this simplified language variety, and a few of them focus on the adaptation of website content [8, 9, 10]. We have observed that these two types of adaptations (to boost sustainability and enhance comprehensibility) present a relationship of correlation. Websites that have been adapted to Easy Language tend to score better in carbon and eco-friendliness calculators. This descriptive study of the relationship between website sustainability recommendations and Easy Language guidelines aims to find a common ground that explains why Easy Language websites tend to be greener. With it, we want to show how in this case, like in many others, accessibility and sustainability can be mutually enriching allies [11].