Reading Level - Accessibility for Writing_GC_108697
Reading Level
Reading Level to Create Accessible Documents
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 suggest we write content that requires reading skills no more advanced than lower secondary education level (roughly 9 years of education). This is to help people with reading disabilities, such as dyslexia. However, there is evidence that writing in a more readable style benefits everyone, including the organization that owns the content.
Proper names can be ignored or removed from the text before assessing whether it meets the reading ability requirement.
Titles can be removed or ignored for the analysis because changing the words in titles might make the titles easier to read but would make it impossible to understand the item to which the title refers.
The readability of content may also be determined by applying a readability formula to selected text only.
Add Show Readability Statistics in Microsoft Word 2010
- Choose File > Options > Proofing
- Under When correcting spelling and grammar in Word
- Select boxes: Check grammar with spelling and Show readability statistics
- Click OK
To Check your Document:
- Review > Select Spelling & Grammar
- When Spell Check is completed, the Readability Statistics will be displayed
Examples:
Readability test results:
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of 15.8 – Too High
Retest after removing proper nouns
The guidelines let you remove proper nouns from content before testing because it can be hard to find shorter words to replace them. Retest, using ‘X’ to replace the proper nouns and titles (so it is still testing sentences of the same length). The results: a Flesch Reading Ease score of 40.6 and a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of 12.5. The reading level is still too high.
See example on following page.
Readability test results with retested content:
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of 12.5 – Still too High
Rewrite with shorter words and sentences
Readability test results: rewritten content: Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of 8.3
Problems with readability scores
Readability testing is easy to do, but has significant weaknesses:
- Grade-level scores for the same text differ when using different formulas
- All words of the same length are treated equally, yet ‘agree’ is probably less difficult than ‘concur’
- Shorter words are treated as easier words, but ‘abide’ is probably more difficult than ‘tolerate’
- Shorter sentences are always considered easier to read. However, a sentence of 20 words is not necessarily easier to understand than one of 22 words
- Sentence structure and style are not considered. The use of passive voice, double negatives, nominalizations, noun strings, idioms and other writing problems are not factored into the formulas
- The length, structure and layout of the content are ignored. Long, poorly organized content with rambling paragraphs and few headings is likely to be less readable than well designed content
- The use of graphics to support or present content cannot be measured by readability formulas
- The degree of difficulty of certain concepts or topics is not given any weight
- Readers’ interest and motivation are ignored, along with their existing knowledge of the topic
- It is difficult to get meaningful results from testing tools when there is extensive use of dot points or tables, as is often the case on the web.
Use readability scores carefully
Despite these problems, some argue that readability testing helps them identify or get agreement that content needs to be rewritten or tested with users. If you use a readability testing tool, be aware of its weaknesses, and avoid rewriting content just to get a lower score. For instance, as I rewrote the Centrelink content, I aimed to:
- Avoid using difficult words (‘contracted’, ‘confidentiality’, ‘provisions’, ‘conducted’)
- Use more familiar words (‘help’ instead of ‘assist’, ‘private’ instead of ‘confidential’)
- Cut back on wordy phrasing (‘free’ instead of ‘at no cost to customers’)
- Replace some nouns with personal pronouns (‘we’, ‘our, ‘you’ instead of ‘Centrelink’ and ‘customers’).
This lowered the reading level, but hopefully it also made the content easier to read.