News Service in Simplified Japanese and its Production Support Systems

The number of foreign residents in Japan has exceeded two million but many of them have trouble understanding regular broadcasts because of the difficulty of the language used in them. We have begun researching a news service in easy Japanese to improve the accessibility of news broadcasts for these people. In this paper, we first explain the development of guidelines for simplifying regular news scripts. We then report on two support systems for rewriting the news. We consider that a team consisting of a Japanese language instructor and a news reporter is best for creating easy and precise news scripts. We developed a special rewriting editor to help them. We finally report on the launch of a public trial service called NEWS WEB EASY in April 2012. The opinions and comments sent to us revealed that deaf people and intellectually handicapped people also had high expectations for our services.