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The medical-vocational guidelines direct or provide a framework for disability determinations and decisions at the final step in our sequential evaluation process. We use the education categories in our medical-vocational guidelines when we analyze age, education, and prior work experience in our disability determinations.   Under this education factor, we propose to clarify that we no longer consider an inability to communicate in English to be equivalent to illiteracy and that we consider a person illiterate” when there is no language in which he or she can read, or there is no language in which he or she can write.

Under this revised definition of illiteracy, we propose clarifying our guidelines on how we evaluate previous work experience for a person in this category when we decide whether he or she is disabled.