Walking through the airport, I wanted to throw away my coffee cup. I found a trash can that said: "Utilise the appropriate receptacle for the disposal of refuse materials." What? It took me three tries to realise they meant "Put trash in the right bin."
Sometimes, people write to sound fancy and elevated (that's a fancy word itself - it means smart). People who read their writing feel the exact opposite.
Clarity isn't a nice to have. It's essential and it's very high up on my list of things that matter in accessibility. Lots of folks will argue other things, like form labels for example, matter more. To them I say, you can label your input and have it mean absolutely nothing to people.
I write assuming someone's reading my words at the end of a long day. Maybe they're reading it on their phone while their kid's asking for a snack. They shouldn't need a dictionary or a second read to understand what I'm saying. Some people have dyslexia. Others are reading in their second language. Many are just tired.
So I write for other people to read. I have no idea of their circumstances, so I try to write clear sentences, alternating short with long paragraphs. Sometimes I use fancier words, then I try to explain them. Sometimes I swear. Sometimes, I screw up.
I never try to dumb things down. That's not writing clearly. That's just thinking the people who read what I write are dumb. They're not.
Writing clearly is respecting people's time and mental energy. Short sentences work. Common words work. They get the job done without making readers feel like they need a thesaurus. That's kind of like a dictionary, I think.
I've learned that if I can't explain something simply, I probably don't understand it well enough myself. And when I do write clearly, something amazing happens. More people read and understand what I've written. They can learn from it. They can use it.
And that's the whole point, isn't it? Communication that communicates.
The Web Almanac for Accessibility starts with Ease of Reading. It acknowledges that it can only focus on things it can measure, but that qualitative factors, such as writing in plain language, matter just as much.
Even if they could measure ease of reading, we wouldn't want to. It would be the wrong thing to measure. Not all audiences are alike. Some do need fancy words, technical words, words that come straight out of that thesaurus. Other audiences are not even reading in English.
I guess my point is, for accessibility, write for your audience, in a language your audience understands. Pick words that don't need a bunch of explanation. If you're writing for engineers, technical terms are fine. If you're writing for everyone, keep it simple.
Know who's reading, and meet them where they are.