The disclosure laws actually help the banks here, by putting the most important terms front and center where it can be argued that the borrower did understand those even if they couldn't understand the rest of the document. In fact many legal documents are structured in such a way, putting the big picture at the top and then defining/clarifying things later.
As far as your general point, what helps is printed materials by the state that lay out general legal advice. For example, take a look at the wonderful California Tenants Guide.
Another thing that would help would be a public standardization of common consumer contracts. There is no need for every lease/employment contract to have its own custom verbiage that a tenant/employee is purportedly responsible for understanding. There should be at most a handful of standard contracts for common relationships, drafted and published by the government. There are already some of these things published by industry groups like landlord's associations, although they can be a bit biased towards their members. Not using a standard contract or lengthy typeset additions should be judged as an a priori attempt to mislead that no amount of initialing will undo.
Furthermore, putting terms in a contract that are blatantly contrary to prevailing law should itself be illegal with its own penalties apart from enforcement of the contract.
Of course the paperwork pushing lobby isn't a fan of such reforms, and will lobby against them by framing such things as "big government" even though they're better described as mitigations of "big government". There is lots of money to be made by perpetuating government dysfunction and then providing a half-solution. See also: Intuit vs tax filing reform.