[robert_tweed]

I think a lot of commenters in this thread are missing an important point about accessibility. It does not just mean "works with screen readers". It means easily understood by anyone. A lot of people confuse the terms e.g. and i.e. so it is normally better to say "For example" or "That is" because these are natural phrases that will be clearly understood by a greater number of people.

I try to constantly improve my writing style, where improve normally means "simplify". I am personally guilty of overusing these abbreviations through force of habit, but I edit them out when I can. For anywhere with a formal house style, adopting this seems to make sense, even for things like scientific papers. Excessive use of jargon is a common accessibility problem and in most cases, there's no good reason for it other than dogma.

I am also a big fan of the old Borland "no nonsense licence" for similar reasons. For anyone that hasn't read it, here's a link:

http://www.osnews.com/story/22342/Borland_in_the_1980s_Treat...

This just illustrates that even something requiring the precision of a legal document can be written in plain, approachable English. There really is no excuse.

[Symbiote]

Many documents and websites produced by government in the UK have the "Crystal Mark for Plain English". Details at [1].

I don't notice the difference, but non-natives have occasionally said they've been surprised when certain information is clear, such as letters from a bank.

[1] http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/services/crystal-mark.html

[anexprogrammer]

You probably would have noticed the difference in the 80s and 90s when banks and others still wrote in tortuous, horrifically formal, English. Why take two sentences when a page and a half would do?

Usually the only places you still regularly saw "inst", notwithstanding and heretofore. If you wanted to understand at first reading being a contract lawyer helped.

The Plain English Campaign took out most of the low hanging fruit years back.