Readability checklist
- Content
This is the first part of two of a series of posts on accessibility, typography, and their friendship 🫂
The series based on my talk ″Accessibility and typography″. I had the talk at Tbilisi A11y & UX Day in November 2024.
The first post is about readability.
Readability is a characteristic of text that defines how easy it is to read the text. There are three main factors that affect readability:
Readability checklist
- Mood and tone match the audience.
- Complexity is as low as possible.
- Words and sentences are short and plain.
- Sentences use the active grammatical voice.
- There are no spelling and grammar mistakes.
- Readability score is 70–100 based on the automatic test.
- There is no critical issues with legibility.
You can find an interactive readability checklist on the Typographa11y site. It is a pet-project supports the post.
Notes
Mood and tone
Mood is the overall feeling of texts. Text mood can be calm, eerie, optimistic, sentimental, etc.
Tone is the creator's feelings about the main topic of the text and their readers. The creator's attitude includes personality traits such as funny, serious, friendly, or sarcastic.
Tone can be polite, neutral or impolite, subjective or objective, etc.
Complexity
Text complexity is its difficulty in reading and understanding.
Text complexity is affected by:
- Purpose: Informational, entertain, persuade, etc.
- Structure: The way how the ideas are organized.
- Layout: How visual elements of the text are presented (headings, paragraphs, lists, etc.)
- Visual supports: Heavy or light use of images and media content.
- Language features: Clarity of the language including vocabulary, sentence structure, and style.
- Knowledge demands: Assumptions about a reader’s level of education and experience.
Sentences, words and voice
Plainspoken, familiar words are more transparent than long and rare ones. For example, more users know about ″maples″ than ″acer.″
Longer sentences are usually harder to break down than concise ones. Avoid convoluted sentence structures with many clauses and conjunctions.
Active voice points out who or what is performing an action in the sentence. For example, ″The cat ate the food.″
Testing
Readability is calculate automatically with readability calculators and grammar checkers.
Readability сalculators check the reading level of your text based on formulas. Readability formulas consider the length of the sentences and the words familiarity.
The reading level counts in approximate years of education. The perfect readability score should be between 70 to 100. This is 5th to 8th grade. It means that the text is understood by teenagers, young adults, and other people.
Another way to conduct the readability testing is to perform the eye tracking test.
Tools
Common readability calculators:
Some examples of grammar checkers: