Why we need Easy Read documents about sex and relationships

You might’ve noticed lately that more consultations, policies, and official documents come with Easy Read versions. There’s even Easy Read resources about how to use condoms and the importance of sexual consent, though far fewer about the messy and human realities of sex, like plainly explaining that sometimes you might queef during sex and that’s completely normal.

We are both disabled people and Easy Read Writers within the IHC advocacy team. We work to make complex information clear, accessible, and usable. Easy Read exists first and foremost for people with intellectual disability. When it works for them, it usually improves clarity for everyone else too. Disabled people are experts in their own experiences, including what happens when access is missing. Information shapes how we understand our situation, our choices, and our confidence to push back.

Disabled people are far too familiar with the fact that New Zealand bureaucracy loves a form. We love a process. Especially a process that requires another process before you can start the first one. Nothing says “inclusive consultation” like a document that assumes unlimited time and emotional resilience. The system’s obsession with forms goes beyond administration and can inadvertently weaponise information as a gate-keeping tool. Bureaucratic English - the kind of language often used by Government - has a particular talent for sounding authoritative while saying very little. It can sound neutral until you’ve spent hours trying to work out whether you qualify for something, while exhausted, stressed, and staring at a wall of text that somehow contains no discernable information.

This is why we need more Easy Read. Everywhere, for everything. Not just essentials like health forms, tenancy agreements, job ads, and election guides, but also the things that make life good: museum signs, event posters, recipes, concert programs, sports guides, bus timetables, and even baking blogs. Too often, Easy Read is treated as a box-ticking exercise instead of an honest attempt to share useful, everyday information. It tends to tell us what should happen, not what actually does. Easy Read shouldn’t shy away from the real or awkward parts of life either: the messiness of human bodies, the confusion of navigating benefits, the exhaustion of caring or being unwell. When accessible information and clear design are the norm, everyone can participate fully: in services, culture, community, and joy.

In Aotearoa right now, many of us are trying to make sense of life under cost-of-living pressure, housing stress, and a health system that’s visibly buckling. Comments about a “$60 grocery budget” have become symbolic of the growing gap between what policy imagines and how people actually live. At the same time, people are given Easy Read resources explaining how to fill out forms or health passports, but almost none that explain what to do when you’re quietly dropped from a referral, stuck on a ghost waitlist, or denied support with no clear way to appeal. At a time when some of us are making impossible choices between groceries and rent, while simultaneously drowning in life admin and the emotional cost of opening another PDF, a cheerful Easy Read about “how to budget” just doesn’t cut it.

We see Easy Read as a form of pan-disability solidarity. Just as ramps and lifts are the baseline for physical access, Easy Read should be the baseline for information access for people with intellectual disability, and we should expect that as a basic condition of rights-based inclusion. But much like ramps, there are secondary benefits for other disabled communities, also helping autistic people, people with brain injuries, chronic illness, or learning disabilities, and anyone dealing with fatigue, pain, stress, or bureaucratic overwhelm. In other words, most of us.

Easy Read also increases access outside of a disability context, making it easier for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) readers and those with low literacy to understand information. Easy Read will always be for people with intellectual disability, but when we prioritise accessibility, society improves and others reap benefits too.

Election years are a reminder that confusion can be politically useful. When policies are wrapped in slogans or layers of jargon, it becomes easier to sell certainty and harder to compare promises with reality. Complexity keeps power where it already sits. Easy Read pushes against that. It makes information usable, invites questions, and enables us to participate as equals instead of being passive recipients of decisions made elsewhere. When information is accessible, we can all question, disagree, and decide for ourselves. Easy Read won’t fix housing shortages or waitlists. It won’t make systems fair overnight. But it reduces mental gymnastics and recognises that understanding is a prerequisite for agency. When we understand what’s happening, we’re better placed to advocate for ourselves and each other.

If information is power, Easy Read is one way we take that power back.