Readability¶

This insights relates to the readability (sentence complexity) of text within web pages. Essentially what we are measuring here is the level of difficulty to read the text. There is no right or wrong here. Instead, the level of difficulty of the text used on a page needs to be matched with the ability of the target audience. We have decided on the following measures:

Flesch Kincaid¶

These readability tests are used extensively in the field of education. The "Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level Formula" instead presents a score as a U.S. grade level. The result is a number that corresponds with a U.S. grade level.

Automated Readability¶

The automated readability index (ARI) is a readability test for English texts, designed to gauge the understandability of a text. Like the Flesch–Kincaid grade level and other tests it produces an approximate representation of the US grade level needed to comprehend the text.

Dale-Chall:¶

The Dale–Chall readability formula is a readability test that provides a numeric gauge of the comprehension difficulty that readers come upon when reading a text. It uses a list of 3000 words that groups of fourth-grade American students could reliably understand, considering any word not on that list to be difficult.

Score	Notes
4.9 or lower	easily understood by an average 4th-grade student or lower
5.0–5.9	easily understood by an average 5th or 6th-grade student
6.0–6.9	easily understood by an average 7th or 8th-grade student
7.0–7.9	easily understood by an average 9th or 10th-grade student
8.0–8.9	easily understood by an average 11th or 12th-grade student
9.0–9.9	easily understood by an average 13th to 15th-grade (college) student

Lexical Richness¶

Lexical richness is a simple measure calculated by dividing the number of words by the number of different words. Therefore the smaller the number the higher the lexical richness.