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Dragonfly

Winter 2002 -- Volume 33, Number 1

Easy-To-Read? Here's How To Find Out.

Nancy Press
NN/LM PNR Consumer Health Coordinator

Find out if a web site is easy-to-read...using software you probably already have.

Ability to read makes a difference in health care. One study "revealed that those who read at the lowest grade levels (grades 0-2) had average annual health care costs of $12,974 compared with $2969 for the overall population studied." (Health Literacy, Report of the Council on Scientific Affairs Ad Hoc Committee on Health Literacy for the Council on Scientific Affairs, American Medical Association, JAMA Vol. 281 No. 6, February 10, 1999, 552-7.)

A long-term way of addressing this problem is to improve the literacy level of the population but, right now, we need to ensure that people can get plenty of easy-to-read materials. In the RML we are often asked to recommend Web materials that are easy-to-read. How do we find out? We asked a noted health educator and have been following her advice ever since.

1. Copy the text of the web page or pages. A sample will do; if a discussion of diabetes is spread over 4 or 5 different pages, just copy one.

2. Paste the text into a blank MS Word document.

3. In Word, under "Tools" choose "Options." Click on the "Spelling and Grammar" tab. Make sure that there is a check in the box next to "Show readability statistics." Click "ok."

4. Now, under "Tools" choose "Spelling and Grammar." Click "Ignore" as many times as you have to in order to get past those spelling change screens. The last screen you will get has a section entitled "Readability." Passive sentences are harder to understand, so the readability information includes a passive sentence tally. Then, note the "Flesch Reading Ease" score and the "Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level."

For one particular project a community asked me to find web sites that were no higher than 6th grade reading level, so I used this test and eliminated any links to sites that came in at above 6.0 on the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level scale. Your institution may choose a different grade level depending on the community it serves.

You won't be able to use this method with .pdf files or with graphic files, but it works well for text files.

Dragonfly, Winter, 2002 -- Volume 33, Number 1
(posted on PNRNews February 7, 2002)

This publication is funded in whole with Federal funds from the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, under Contract No. N01-LM-1-3516.

NN/LM | UW HSL | NN/LM PNR | Contact us: nnlm@u.washington.edu | Revised: February 7, 2002