What percentage of the general adult public do you think is literate?
Actually, take a step back - how do we even define “literate”?
Literacy is a fairly vague term. To some people, being “literate” means being able to read most words on a page. To others, it means being able to read any complex text and extract meaning from it. The OECD’s PIAAC program tackles this by assigning various levels to adult literacy and then finding out what proportion of each country reaches those levels.
To reach level 2 (of 4), a person must be able to read at a sixth-grade level. Let’s take that as a basic level of literacy, and ask again, what percentage of the general adult population of the USA, UK, or other English-speaking nations is literate?
It’s just 46%. Less than half of adults can read at a sixth-grade level or better.
Literacy is a huge part of why Readable exists. We are driven by a passionate belief that people who, for whatever reason, struggle with reading shouldn’t be denied meaningful access to written resources.
Our work doesn’t just benefit those people; it also benefits writers and companies. Readability analysis is like a cheat code for content, potentially doubling the number of people *who are already landing on your content* who can read, enjoy, and understand it.
All that is very easy to say, but how specifically can you take your content from Grade 10 (being impenetrable to half your audience) up to Grade 5 (and accessible to everyone)? Simple, read on and follow this simple guide.
1. What Is Readability?
Readability is one part of the accessibility landscape. It is a way to quickly analyse large amounts of text to find out how easy it is to read, and to spot where improvements need to be made.
There are several different readability formulas people use (and we produce scores for all of them), but most people use the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score for content, which analyzes word difficulty and sentence length to produce a pretty good measure of how much education someone will need to be able to read it.
2. The Importance of Writing for Everyone
Few people question the benefit of making sure their content is readable by the color-blind, or making sure their website navigation isn’t just opaque symbols, or adding helpful descriptions to their web images. In every case, we are making sure that everybody who sees our content is able to read it. We’re avoiding wasting eyeballs. We’re maximising the potential of our content.
Readability is exactly the same. Monitoring your content readability and fixing it when it’s in an uncomfortable range opens doors to a wider audience and enhances the engagement of your content.
3. Measuring Your Readability
It’s not enough just to be vaguely aware of the concept of readability, or that you should try to produce only content that is highly readable, it’s important to monitor your output to ensure that you’re hitting your targets every time you publish.
Readable provides a suite of tools to help with this part of the process. We can analyse documents, emails, and websites. We can alert you when your content isn’t up to your standards. And we can make suggestions to improve your content so it hits your targets.
Without measuring your content, it’s very hard to know where to direct your resources to improve it. Content analytics helps you find the highest value pages where you can have the greatest impact.
4. Tips for Writing More Readably and Accessibly
Readable provides specific guidance, but general readability tips can also be a lot of help:
- Use plain language. For example, don’t say “terminate” if “stop” will work as well.
- Use short sentences. Not exclusively, but when you can. Short sentences are easier to read.
- Avoid jargon and industry-specific language where possible. Jargon is rarely clear. And while industry-specific language is sometimes necessary, it is important to avoid it when talking to a broad audience.
- Break content into chunks. Huge paragraphs are hard work. Short ones are much easier to handle. Use headings and subheadings to separate chunks apart.
- Use lists where appropriate. Lists are lovely to read.
- Include a table of contents if what you are writing is very long.
- Write for a broad audience. When you’re writing, if you have a reader in mind, remember they might not read very well.
5. Test and Evaluate Your Content
There are lots of ways to measure how successful your content is, and how much of an impact your work on readability is having. Most likely, the best ways for you to measure that are going to be specific to you, but here are a few real-world ideas and examples we found particularly interesting:
- Scroll-tracking. One of our most successful customers implemented scroll-tracking on their content to see how far users made it through their content before they stopped reading. Before starting work on their readability, they found that only 32% of users who made it past the first 5% of the content-rich pages they monitored continued to read 80% of the page. That means that only about one-third of people who started reading a web article finished reading it. They improved the readability of 70 pages on their website, and repeated the analysis, to find the percentage had increased to 57% - almost double. Of those who didn’t make it to the end, a greater proportion clicked through to elsewhere in the website following internal links.
- Norway is a leader in plain language content, even having a law requiring all public bodies to use clear language. In one example of their tracking of success, they discovered that fixing the readability of letters from the public roads administration led to a 40% reduction in calls from frustrated citizens.
- Talking to your users. Ask your users how they feel about your content, and what they found confusing and/or clear. Third-party user testing can be useful here if you are unable for any reason to speak to your audience directly.
- Bounce rate. Your bounce rate is the proportion of your website visitors who leave after seeing only one page. Measuring this, for pages where you are improving readability, can provide insight into what works for your audience.
Readability is an essential part of the accessibility toolkit, and it’s far from a hard problem to solve. Identify the content that’s letting your users down and fix it, and measure the results.
Sign up to Readable today to start measuring the readability of your content.
