OBJECTIVES To study whether linguistic analysis and changes in information leaflets can improve readability and understanding. DESIGN Randomised, controlled study. Two information leaflets concerned with trials of drugs for conditions/diseases which are commonly known were modified, and the original was tested against the revised version. SETTING Denmark. PARTICIPANTS 235 persons in the r...

The present paper introduces and evaluates a readability measurement method designed for learners of EFL (English as a foreign language). The proposed readability measurement method (a regression model) estimates the text readability based on linguistic features, such as lexical, syntactic and discourse features. Text readability refers to the comprehension rate of a text (0.0-1.0). The experim...

Readability research has a long and rich tradition, but there has been too little focus on general readability prediction without targeting a specific audience or text genre. Moreover, although NLP-inspired research has focused on adding more complex readability features, there is still no consensus on which features contribute most to the prediction. In this article, we investigate in close de...

INTRODUCTION To assess the readability of informed consent documents (IC) of the different national surgical societies. METHODS During January 2012 we collected 504 IC protocols of different specialties. To calculate readability parameters the following criteria were assessed: number of words, syllables and phrases, syllables/word and word/phrase averages, Word correlation index, Flesch-Szigr...

BACKGROUND State governments provide preprinted advance directive forms to the general public. However, many adults in the United States (US) lack the skills necessary to read and comprehend health care-related materials. In this study, we sought to determine the readability of state government-sponsored advance directive forms. METHODS A cross sectional study design was used. The readability...

In this paper, we present a new approach to ranking that considers the reading ability (and motivation) of the user. Web pages can be, increasingly, badly written with unfamiliar words, poor use of syntax, ambiguous phrases and so on. Readability research suggests that experts and motivated readers may overcome confusingly written text, but nevertheless find it an irritation. We investigate usi...

BACKGROUND Because the quality of information on the Internet is of dubious worth, many patients seek out reliable expert sources. As per the American Medical Association (AMA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) recommendations, readability of patient education materials should not exceed a sixth-grade reading level. The average reading skill of U.S. adults is at the eighth-grade level...

Readability metric is considered to be one of the most important factors that may affect games business in terms of evaluating games’ quality in general and usability in particular. As games may go through many evolutions and developed by many developers, code readability can significantly impact the time and resources required to build, update or maintain such games. This paper introduces a ne...

In this paper we present computational models to compute readability of Indian language text documents. We first demonstrate the inadequacy and the consequent inapplicability of some of the popular readability metrics in English to Hindi and Bangla. Next, we present user experiments to identify important structural parameters of Bangla and Hindi that affect readability of texts in these two lan...