Plain language web writing: why clarity is an accessibility requirement, not a style preference

What plain language means (and what it does not)

Plain language is writing that allows readers to find what they need, understand what they find, and use that information. That is the definition used by the Plain Language Association International, and it is worth sitting with, because it is functional rather than aesthetic. The question plain language asks is not "does this sound good?" but "can the reader actually do something with this?"

Plain language is not simplistic language. It does not mean stripping out nuance, avoiding technical terms entirely, or writing for a five-year-old. It means choosing the most direct path between what you know and what your reader needs to understand. A plumber explaining emergency shut-off procedures to homeowners should write differently than a plumber writing a specification document for a contractor. Both can use plain language; the vocabulary and assumed knowledge differ.

Plain language is also not the same as short content. Some topics are complex and require sustained explanation. Plain language means that the complexity lives in the subject matter, not in unnecessarily tangled prose. Long articles can be excellent examples of plain language. Short articles can fail it completely.

What plain language does require is: sentences that are short enough to parse in a single breath, verbs doing the work rather than nouns, active voice as the default, concrete examples rather than abstract generalities, and structure that lets readers navigate rather than wade. These are craft skills, not style preferences — and they have direct, documented impacts on comprehension for a wide range of readers.

Why plain language is an accessibility issue, not just a style choice

Cognitive disabilities are the most common category of disability in Canada. They include dyslexia, acquired brain injuries, intellectual disabilities, ADHD, dementia, and learning disabilities — conditions that affect how people process written language, hold information in working memory, filter irrelevant detail, and navigate complex structure. According to Statistics Canada, approximately 22% of Canadians aged 15 and over have at least one disability, and cognitive and mental-health-related disabilities are among the most prevalent.

For these users, dense web content is not merely inconvenient. It can make a page entirely unusable. A person with dyslexia navigating a long paragraph of passive-voice sentences with embedded clauses is not having a suboptimal experience — they are facing a genuine barrier to understanding the information you have published. A person with an acquired brain injury trying to follow multi-step instructions presented as an undifferentiated block of text may not be able to complete a task that would take a neurotypical reader thirty seconds.

This is why the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines include cognitive accessibility provisions. WCAG 2.1 Success Criterion 3.1.5, at Level AAA, requires that when text requires reading ability more advanced than lower secondary education level, supplemental content or an alternative version is available. Level AAA is the highest tier — it is aspirational rather than strictly required in most contexts — but the principle it encodes is not aspirational. The principle is that reading level is an access issue, and that unnecessarily complex text excludes real people.

WCAG 2.2 and the emerging WCAG 3.0 framework both place increased emphasis on cognitive accessibility, reflecting growing recognition within the standards community that the population of users with cognitive disabilities is large, that existing guidelines underserved them, and that improvements are achievable without heroic effort from web authors.

The Canadian regulatory context (Accessible Canada Act, government plain language standards, WCAG 3.1.5)

The Accessible Canada Act (ACA), which received royal assent in 2019, aims to make Canada barrier-free by 2040. It applies to federally regulated organizations — federal government departments and agencies, Crown corporations, banks, telecommunications companies, interprovincial transportation companies, and broadcasters. If your business falls into one of these categories, the ACA creates direct obligations around accessibility, and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and Accessibility Standards Canada are both active in developing and enforcing standards.

For small businesses outside federally regulated sectors, the ACA does not create direct legal exposure. However, provincial accessibility legislation fills some of that gap. Ontario's Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) applies to private-sector organizations with one or more employees in Ontario. The Information and Communications Standard under AODA requires that new web content conform to WCAG 2.0 Level AA. Manitoba's Accessibility for Manitobans Act and Nova Scotia's Accessibility Act create similar frameworks, and other provinces are in various stages of legislative development.

The federal government of Canada has published explicit plain language standards for government communications since the 1990s, and the Treasury Board Secretariat's guidance on web writing mandates plain language for all federal web content. These standards are not binding on private businesses, but they represent the closest thing Canada has to a codified plain language standard — and they are detailed, practical, and freely available as a reference.

WCAG 3.1.5 (Reading Level, Level AAA) is the most direct standards reference. While Level AAA conformance is not required by most regulatory regimes, many accessibility auditors and procurement policies reference it as a best practice target. More practically, the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level test — which is built into Microsoft Word, available in most readability tools, and what WCAG 3.1.5 implicitly references — gives you a concrete, measurable target to aim for.

Seven plain language techniques that work in practice

The following techniques are drawn from plain language research and government standards. They are ordered roughly by impact — the first few will do more for your content than the last few, though all of them contribute.

Use active voice. Active voice puts the actor at the front of the sentence and the action immediately after. "Your application has been received and will be reviewed within five business days" becomes "We received your application and will review it within five business days." The active version is shorter, clearer, and tells the reader who is doing what. Passive voice is not grammatically wrong, but used habitually it makes writing harder to parse, especially for readers with cognitive disabilities who must hold more of the sentence in working memory to understand who is responsible for what.

Write shorter sentences. A useful target is an average sentence length of fifteen to twenty words. Longer sentences are not automatically bad — variety in length makes prose readable — but if your average sentence length exceeds twenty-five words, you are likely creating comprehension problems. Complex ideas can be expressed in short sentences; the technique is to break the idea into steps rather than packing everything into a single grammatical unit.

Choose common words. When a simpler word means the same thing, use it. "Utilize" means "use." "Commence" means "start." "Subsequent to" means "after." "Endeavour to" means "try to." This is not about dumbing down — it is about removing friction between your reader and the information they need. There are genuinely precise words that have no plain-language equivalent; use them when they are necessary, define them when your audience may not know them.

Define jargon explicitly. Every industry has terminology that is precise and efficient within the industry and opaque outside it. On a website serving non-specialist customers, your job is to translate. Define a term the first time you use it, either parenthetically or in a callout. Do not assume your reader knows what "managed hosting," "SSL certificate," or "DNS propagation" means — or what PIPEDA is, or what a Section 9 trademark application involves. The definition can be brief; what matters is that the reader does not have to leave your page to understand a key concept.

Front-load the important information. Journalists call this the inverted pyramid: put the most important information first, supporting detail second, background last. Web readers scan before they read. If the payoff of a paragraph is buried in the final sentence, many readers will never reach it. The first sentence of every paragraph should tell readers what the paragraph is about and why it matters. If they stop reading after the first sentence of every paragraph, they should still understand the article.

Use headings that tell the story. A heading like "Overview" tells the reader nothing. A heading like "Why your host's backup system is not enough" tells the reader exactly what the section will argue and why it matters. Descriptive headings serve screen reader users (who navigate by heading) and sighted readers who scan before committing to read — but they also serve cognitively diverse readers who need to build a mental map of content structure before they can follow the detail.

Break up walls of text. Paragraphs longer than about 100 words become obstacles. Not every paragraph needs to be short — some arguments require sustained development — but a page with no paragraph breaks shorter than 200 words is a page that many readers will abandon. Lists, callouts, subheadings, and short paragraphs all create visual and cognitive breathing room. This is not padding; it is architecture.

Measuring readability: tools and realistic targets

Readability formulas are imperfect — they measure proxies for complexity (word length, sentence length) rather than actual comprehension. But they are useful as a diagnostic tool. A Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score of 14 on a contact page aimed at small business owners is a reliable signal that something needs revision, even if the formula cannot tell you exactly what.

The Hemingway Editor (hemingwayapp.com) is a free browser-based tool that highlights long sentences, passive voice, adverbs, and phrases with simpler alternatives. It also displays a readability grade level. It is the quickest way to get an objective read on a piece of content. The target for most business web content is Grade 8 or below — which does not mean the content is simplistic, it means it is accessible to the broadest possible audience.

Microsoft Word and Google Docs both include built-in readability statistics. In Word, enable "Show readability statistics" under proofing options and the Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level scores appear after every spelling and grammar check. Readability Formulas (readabilityformulas.com) offers multiple scoring algorithms online for free and is useful when you want more than one metric.

A realistic target for most Canadian business websites: Flesch Reading Ease above 60, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level at or below 8, average sentence length under 20 words. These are targets, not hard ceilings — a legal explainer may legitimately score higher because the subject matter is genuinely complex. But if your About page scores Grade 12, the complexity is almost certainly in your writing, not your subject.

Common objections — and why they do not hold up

Plain language attracts a predictable set of objections, most of which dissolve on examination.

"Our clients are sophisticated professionals — they expect formal language." Sophisticated professionals are not made more comfortable by unnecessarily complex writing; they are made more comfortable by precise writing. Plain language and formal language are not opposites. A legal brief written in plain language is still a legal brief. What plain language eliminates is the pretension that complexity signals expertise — expertise signals expertise, and clarity makes it legible.

"Plain language undermines our brand." Consider the brands most consistently praised for their writing: Apple, Basecamp, Mailchimp, Stripe. All of them use plain language deliberately and well. Their brand voice is distinctive not because of complicated prose but because of specific word choices, a clear point of view, and writing that respects the reader's time. Plain language does not eliminate brand voice; it is what makes brand voice possible.

"Changing our content would take too long." You do not have to revise everything at once. Start with the pages that carry the most weight — your homepage, your services pages, your contact page, your FAQ. Apply the techniques above. Measure before and after with a readability tool. The improvement is usually significant and often visible within an hour of editing. Plain language is a skill; like any skill, it gets faster with practice.

"We already write clearly." This is the hardest objection to address, because the people who write complex content rarely experience it as complex — they know the subject well enough that the shortcuts feel obvious. The test is not whether the writer finds the content clear, but whether a reader encountering the subject for the first time can understand it without assistance. Readability tools and real user feedback answer that question more reliably than the author's intuition.

Plain language is not a diminishment of your content. It is the difference between writing that sits on a page and writing that does its job. For the roughly one in five Canadians who navigate the web with a cognitive disability, it is the difference between a door that opens and one that does not. That is an accessibility requirement. It is also good writing.