Awareness
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Health Equity Guiding Principles for Inclusive Communication provides principles to guide inclusive communications along with additional resources and tools for putting principles into action.
National Center for Education Statistics: Health Literacy of America's Adults (2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy) describes levels of health literacy and offers data and tables to help practitioners understand the importance of plain language for health literacy.
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: A New Way to Talk About the Social Determinants of Health (2010) provides guidance to practitioners on how to use plain language when describing the determinants of health.
Accessibility in Communication
Pacific ADA Center is a regional partnership between the disabilities and business communities. The partnership has led to the development of preparedness toolkits for people with disabilities.
The Center also offers training and webinars designed to help emergency management practitioners be more inclusive in their whole community approach to preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation work. Be sure to check the archives for previously recorded sessions.
US Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division: ADA Requirements: Effective Communication helps communications practitioners and service providers at the state and local level understand their legal obligations related to access and functional needs in communication under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Communicate Health's Writing about Disabilities playbook for communicating about health topics effectively when developing materials for with people with disabilities.
Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Communication
US Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Minority Health: National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services in Health and Health Care (CLAS) outlines standards for providing culturally and linguistically appropriate services. The site contains tools and resources for implementing CLAS standards.
US Department of Justice: Limited English Proficiency has a section dedicated to helping communicators support populations with Limited English Proficiency. Emergency preparedness professionals and communicators can learn more about best practices in planning for language access, emergency preparedness, interpretation, translation, public assistance and health.
Regional Disaster Preparedness Organization has developed a messaging resources page with images, ASL videos, and a database of pre-translated emergency phrases. They welcome other agencies to use the tools. While most tools are agency agnostic, some tools may direct users to PublicAlerts.org. Users outside of the Portland, OR metro region should replace PublicAlerts.org with a more geographically appropriate link.
Communicate Health's Writing for LGBTQ+ Communities is a playbook for communicating about health topics effectively when when developing materials for LGBTQ+ communities.