8 Sidor — Sweden's Plain-Language Digital News Service for Cognitive Accessibility

Founded in 1984 after a parent of a struggling reader lobbied Sweden's national association for people with intellectual disabilities (FUB) for simplified news, 8 Sidor became a permanent weekly newspaper in 1987 and has been published since 2015 by Myndigheten för tillgängliga medier (MTM), the Swedish government's accessible-media agency, funded by the Ministry of Culture. It writes news in 'lättläst' (easy-to-read) Swedish: larger type, shorter sentences and everyday vocabulary that explains what happened, where and why.
The service is now digital-first: 8sidor.se publishes new stories every weekday for free with no login, complemented by a mobile app, a screen-reader-compatible listening option, a subscription print edition (roughly 9,500 copies) and a braille edition for blind readers. According to Swedish Wikipedia's sourced circulation data, each print issue reaches an estimated 100,000 readers nationwide.
8 Sidor's stated readership spans primary-school pupils, adult-education students, people with intellectual disabilities, and immigrants learning Swedish — a deliberately broad definition of cognitive and language accessibility rather than a single disability group. This breadth is also its main evidence gap for a catalogue like this one: MTM and 8sidor.se report reach and format details clearly, but neither publishes a rigorous, independent study measuring comprehension gains or outcomes for readers, only circulation and audience-description figures.
As a long-running, state-funded institution rather than a pilot, 8 Sidor is a useful contrast to newer app-based accessibility projects: it shows that sustaining plain-language digital access to news at national scale is achievable over four decades, even without the kind of outcome evaluation that shorter-lived, grant-funded initiatives are often required to produce.

Read the full analysis: https://8sidor.se/om-8-sidor/