"Call the police. Ploddledygook is murdering the English language," went a headline in The Times on 9 May 2013.

Simon de Bruxelles quoted a hefty chunk of impenetrable blah posing as "instructions" for police officers entering Avon & Somerset's annual Problem Solving Awards.

That a British police authority should gush meaningless fluffy managementspeak is no surprise. That's the reality in every sector today, as Don Watson so eloquently explained in a Radio New Zealand interview yesterday.

What's amazing (and wonderful) to me is the indignant response of some of the police officers who tried to read this ploddledygook. (That word will be with us forever.)

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A quick guide to making your documents accessible to blind or low-vision people follows.

Remember the acronym: FILTH

For accessible content, you need to scrub away five sorts of rubbish.

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Accessibility means making access possible and easy for everyone, including people with any sort of disability. (That'll be you, one of these days.)

And whether we're talking about physical space, appliances, or information, providing access means clearing the way. Getting rid of obstacles, and cleaning up the ROT and FILTH.

ROT is redundant, outdated and trivial content: that's mainly ancient rubbish—information that needs to be chopped out.

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Virtually all information is created and transmitted and stored and shared and searched by means of computers and the internet. That’s obvious, right?

At work, it is commonly assumed that anything digital or electronic is solely the business of those clever people in web management or IT. Accountants and teachers and office managers have no need to bother their pretty little heads about such nerdy matters. Right? Wrong.

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Technology has changed all business communication—forever. Content strategy is crucial. All business writing is content. All content is digital, social, visual and mobile. Your audience expects to interact, contribute and be heard online. And much business content is visible to a critical public and is inevitably perceived as communication from the organisation.

Meet the 7 SAD MICE of the digital workplace. They are facts of life.

• S is for Social.
• A is for Audio-visual.
• D is for Digital.
• M is for Mobile.
• I is for International.
• C is for corporate.
• E is for Electronic.

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