Guaranteeing Equal Access to Information and Plain Japanese as a Means of Equal Participation for Everyone : Specific Problems and Shared Aspects between Foreigners, Deaf and Hard-of-hearing People, and People with Intellectual Disabilities(<Special Issue>Practical Sociolinguistic Research toward "Welfare-Linguistics")

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new framework in order to discuss further efforts to promote "guaranteeing equal access to information", a topic which has received a lot of attention after the Great East Japan Earthquake. In this paper, however, we do not limit the discussion to emergencies but extend it to normal situations. In this discussion, we need to take into account the following three points: 1) tailoring the form of information to each person's specific needs, 2) overcoming all barriers which prevent some people from accessing information equally, and 3) ensuring that every single person can always send out information. With this in mind, we introduce three cases of information limitation, foreigners, deaf and hard-of-hearing people, and people with intellectual disabilities, and consider problems specific to each group and what they share in common. We point out the necessity of "universal design of information" as the best way to address shared problems, and present "plain Japanese" as a concrete means of implementing this.