Japanese firm rewrites magazines and manga for disabled readers
- It also conducts other projects such as drafting simple contracts for the mentally disabled as part of its welfare service
Projects to rewrite newspaper articles, government documents and even manga normally too difficult for persons with mental disabilities to understand have taken off in Japan, thanks mainly to endeavours by a local civics group.
While progress has been made toward achieving full barrier-free access for the physically disabled with the installation of ramps and other facilities, measures to clear obstacles in the way of the mentally disabled have been sorely lacking.
Helping to change that is a civics group called Slow Communication based in Yokohama, southwest of Tokyo, which publishes easy-to-understand Japanese news articles on its website. All the sentences are short and the Chinese characters come with smaller kana, or syllabic characters, to assist with pronunciation.
One recent bare-bones article reads in part: “On January 26, 2019, tennis player Naomi Osaka won a tennis championship. The championship won by Osaka was the Australian Open.”
Regular news and newspaper articles are too difficult for me to understand
As a rule, neither double negatives nor metaphors are used in constructing the sentences and there are many line breaks. Readers can also click a play button to hear an audio version of the article being read at a slow pace.