In the summer of 2009 NALA (the Irish National Adult Literacy Agency) put out a call for proposals to research the principles behind the plain English guidelines.
DEIS were successful in submitting a proposal to undertake the work. We approched the report bearing in mind the multi-literacies of today's information-heavy society. We used the plain English guidelines as a jumping-off point to explore the implications of such media saturation on image and information processing across the different types of information-delivery media in use today.
My role within the project involved investigating and documenting the research behind information processing, image processing, information design, instructional design and the plain English guidelines. Based on this research I contributed to a number of recommendations and augmentations to the plain English guidelines.
The research report can be downloaded from here.