Soon after my appointment as education officer at the Royal Naval Museum Portsmouth in April 1998 I introduced into the museum the idea of Margareta Ekarv's philosophy of writing readable texts, including: simple language, short sentences, one main idea per line of text and laying out text so it coincides with the natural phrasing of the text.

It was an opportunity to examine the function of display panels by exploring related factors such as visitor learning styles and the role of panels in relation to other interpretive media such as other more detailed texts.

I used the introductory panels as part of a layered system of interpretational media including more detailed labels for individual objects and whilst these longer, in-depth panels did not follow the Ekarv model exactly they did use strait forward language in an easily read style.