Making legal services more accessible
COALITION research project
For people living with learning disabilities, accessing legal services can be hard. Legal language and documents are highly technical and complex, and legal resources are rarely designed to be accessible to people with low literacy. The “Co-Producing Accessible Legal Information” research project, or COALITION, set out to change that.
“There's this massive unmet legal need in terms of translating quite complex legal ideas into accessible formats to help people with learning disabilities access legal services and find out what their rights are,” says Rosie Harding, a University of Birmingham Professor of Law, who led the research team.
The need for those services is acute. People living with learning disabilities face discrimination, harassment and hate crimes, as well as barriers to everything from employment to housing and police services. By law, their movements and decision-making are often restricted.
Mental Capacity law reaches into every little tiny crack and crevice of the lives of people with impaired capacity. But it is very difficult for those people to access legal information about their rights. There’s lots of information out there, but if it’s not available in a format that people with learning disabilities can use, then it just becomes another barrier to their inclusion in society.
With funding from the University of Birmingham’s Quality Related (QR) research funds, the COALITION project brought together a group of legal professionals and people with learning disabilities for six workshops which discussed the barriers to accessible legal information. The team then co-produced templates that legal service providers can use to make their services more accessible alongside a toolkit for researchers to support inclusive research practice. These include guidance on how to produce “easy read” information and consent forms, which use simple language and images to explain complex legal points.
Enterprise has worked with the team to put a creative commons licence on the templates, and make them publicly available via the online IP licensing platform, e-lucid. “I really wanted to be able to keep track of whether people were accessing the templates so that I can get in touch with them in due course and see if they’ve been useful. It’s really helpful to have that stable platform that people can access the templates through,” says Professor Harding. “Having the templates hosted securely enables us to raise awareness and build on our work.” The COALITION team is now publicising its templates to stakeholders.