Background The patient package inserts (PPIs), which contain the necessary information about medications intended for patients, need to be expressed in a clear language comprehensible to everyone. Objective This study aimed to evaluate the readability and understandability of the drug package inserts for the inexpert people. Methods The readability of the 158 PPIs of the 33 drugs, registere...

Empirical studies have repeatedly pointed out that the readability of a privacy policy is a potential source of trust of online users. Nevertheless, many online companies still keep the readability of their privacy policies at a low level. This could possibly coincide with a low compliance of their privacy policies with the guidelines of fair information practices and thus with users’ privacy e...

BACKGROUND Patients increasingly use the internet to access health information. Inadequate health literacy is common and frequently limits patient comprehension of healthcare literature. We aimed to assess the readability of online consumer-orientated Parkinson's disease (PD) information using two validated measures. METHOD We identified the 100 highest ranked consumer-orientated PD webpages ...

This paper discusses a computational approach to readability that is expected to lead eventually towards a new and configurable metric for text readability. Our research involves the elaboration, implementation and evaluation of an 8-part framework that requires consideration of both textual and cognitive factors such as language, vocabulary, background knowledge, motivation and cognitive load....

This study examines whether the readability of medical research journal abstracts changed from 1960 to 2010. Abstracts from medical journals were downloaded from PubMed.org in ten-year batches (1960s, 1970s, etc.). Abstracts in each decade underwent processing via a custom Python script to determine their Coleman-Liau Index (CLI) readability score. Analysis using one-way ANOVA found statistical...

Readability criteria have been addressed as a measurement of the quality of graph visualizations. In this paper, we argue that readability criteria are necessary but not sufficient. We propose a new kind of criteria, namely faithfulness, to evaluate the quality of graph layouts. We introduce a general model for quantify faithfulness, and contrast it with the well established readability criteri...

In an effort to make reading more accessible, an automated readability formula can help students to retrieve appropriate material for their language level. This study attempts to discover and analyze a set of possible features that can be used for single-sentence readability prediction in Russian. We test the influence of syntactic features on predictability of structural complexity. The readab...

Historically, anti-vaccination sentiment has existed in many populations. Mass media plays a large role in disseminating and sensationalizing vaccine objections, especially via the medium of the Internet. Based on studies of processing fluency, we assumed that anti-influenza vaccination online messages to be more readable and more fluently processed than pro-influenza vaccination online message...

In this paper we investigate the impact of translation on readability. We propose a quantitative analysis of several shallow, lexical and morpho-syntactic features that have been traditionally used for assessing readability and have proven relevant for this task. We conduct our experiments on a parallel corpus of transcribed parliamentary sessions and we investigate readability metrics for the ...