Swindon Borough Council makes public information accessible with an Easy Read generative AI tool built on Amazon Bedrock
Swindon Borough Council· United KingdomAmazon BedrockSwindon Borough Council, a local authority in England, built an Easy Read solution using Amazon Bedrock to make council documents accessible to residents with learning disabilities, low literacy or cognitive impairment. The generative AI summarizes and simplifies complex text and generates matching images, presenting simplified text alongside images on the page. The council tested the tool on a complex tenancy agreement over 50 pages long and, working with a group of Experts by Experience of a Learning Disability, refined the format based on their feedback. Combined with the council's existing Translate solution, content can be produced in 75 languages. Manually adapting a five-page document into Easy Read format previously cost around £500 and took two weeks; the council can now create an accessible multi-page document for 7-10 pence per page. The council plans to make the tool open source for other councils to use.
Overview
Swindon Borough Council, a local authority in England, built an Easy Read solution using Amazon Bedrock to make council documents accessible to residents with learning disabilities, low literacy or cognitive impairment. The generative AI summarizes and simplifies complex text and generates matching images, presenting simplified text alongside images on the page. The council tested the tool on a complex tenancy agreement over 50 pages long and, working with a group of Experts by Experience of a Learning Disability, refined the format based on their feedback. Combined with the council's existing Translate solution, content can be produced in 75 languages. Manually adapting a five-page document into Easy Read format previously cost around £500 and took two weeks; the council can now create an accessible multi-page document for 7-10 pence per page. The council plans to make the tool open source for other councils to use.
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Inspect the highlighted sourceThe challenge
Not all citizens have the same ability to identify and digest information that's important to them, so councils have to invest in alternative Easy Read versions of documents. It can typically cost £120 to adapt content manually for a single page with five lines and five images, and an average five-page document would take two weeks to adapt and cost £500 — unsustainable in terms of demand on council resources.
The solution
Swindon Borough Council built an Easy Read solution using Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that lets teams build and scale generative AI applications, to summarize and simplify complex text and generate matching images, presenting simplified text on the right side of a page and images on the left. The council tested the tool on a complex tenancy agreement more than 50 pages long, sending early samples to Adult Social Care before moving into a deeper engineering phase. Working with a group called Experts by Experience of a Learning Disability, the council refined the format based on their feedback — learning that images are important, text size needs to be bigger than usual, the space between text needs to be wider, and jargon and ambiguous terms must be avoided. The council combined the tool with its existing Translate solution to make content available in 75 languages.
Reported business value
It can typically cost £120 to adapt content manually for a single page with five lines and five images, and an average five-page document would take two weeks to adapt and cost £500 — unsustainable given council resource pressures. The council can now create an accessible multi-page document for 7-10 pence per page. The council plans to make the tool open source, along with its prompts and parameters, for other councils and public/third-sector organizations to use.
Sources
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