Adult illiteracy

[cleverjake]

I've been watching the recent 'gremlins' adverts for the Get on adult education programme on the television, and it got me wondering how you'd encourage illiterate adults to read and write.

Bear with me...

I mean, if you were to use any text - be it on screen or in print, it'd have to be very basic. Words such as "the" and "you" for example. I should imagine that numbers would be understood too, which would provide a link between text and the human voice when used as a phone number.

Anyone else have any thoughts about this? How would you get information across to illiterate adults? (I know that you can get special browsers for the Internet that 'read' out the text.)

But how would you get a message across in the first place?

Incidentally, it was the Nescafé bus advert that got me thinking of this - the way they've used padlocks and keys to make up the slogan.

[tvmercia]

its funny the way the adverts always contain white people ... whilst you would imagine the service would be of particular interest to immigrants, refugees etc.

[Cheese Head]

It's probably quite hard to advertise to illiterate people when they can't see whats on screen.

I think it realy works as an encouragement, it's up to the said people to sort themselves out, as it were.

[Pete]

if it's on telly there is a voiceover and pictures.

[cleverjake]

Yes, a voiceover is a god-send. I was thinking more of on screen/print though.

Take the fire exit sign for example. It's a symbol of a stickMAN and an arrow pointing down supposedly through a door. Forget the fact in the case of a fire, you'd follow everyone else - if you couldn't read "fire exit", and were female, where would you run to?

On a lighter note, if it was me in a fire, the arrow on the sign would make me hit the deck!

[Pete]

if you couldn't read "fire exit", and were female, where would you run to?

*whatever*

[Nick Harvey]

The trouble with a fire exit sign is that it depicts a man running, yet you're always told not to run in the case of a fire or other emergency.

[cleverjake]

if you couldn't read "fire exit", and were female, where would you run to?

*whatever*

Okay, so it was a bad example. But you know what I mean. Taking pictures literally doesn't work. So how would you do it?