An idea from Language Log.....
The December 13th post "From TV To Text," by Benjamin Zimmer -- at http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog -- is a report on a partnership between the Google Foundation and the PlanetRead project. PlanetRead is trying to increase literacy in India by running text captions across the bottom of the television screen during tv shows to provide "literacy practice" for viewers.

This caught my attention because it seems to me to be one way you could spread basic health care information -- like the basic nutrition information for pregnant women and infants under the age of two that we were discussing here a little while back -- in the United States. IF people would actually read it, and not just ignore it the way you can ignore the trailers running across the bottom of the screen on news and financial channels.

You'll remember that a number of commenters said putting that information into printed materials wasn't the way to go, that the medium had to be television. I wonder if running those basics in very brief simple-vocabulary lines of text across the bottom of the screen during soap opera scenes involving women and little kids would work for at least part of the audience, for example?

Maybe it would be perceived as helpful. Maybe it would be ignored. And maybe it would be perceived as intrusive and patronizing and insulting....