Researchers and practitioners frequently use readability formulas to predict the suitability of health-related texts for consumers (e.g., patient instructions, informed consent documents). However, the appropriateness of using readability formulas originally developed for students and educational texts for lay audiences and health-related texts remains to be validated. In this exploratory study...

Although many approaches have been presented to compute and predict readability of documents in different languages, the information provided by readability systems often fail to show in a clear and understandable way how difficult a document is and which aspects contribute to content readability. We address this issue by presenting a system that, for a given document in Italian, provides not o...

Automatic assessment of the readability level (i.e., the relative linguistic complexity) of documents in a large number of languages is an important problem that can be applied to many real-world applications, such as retrieving age-appropriate search engine results for kids, constructing automatic tutoring systems, and so on. Unfortunately, existing readability labeling techniques have only be...

Software readability and comprehension are important factors in software maintenance. There is a large body of research on software measurement, but the actual factors that make software easier to read or easier to comprehend are not well understood. In the present study, we investigate the role of method chains and code comments in software readability and comprehension. Our analysis comprises...

The topic of source code readability has paramount importance in software engineering. Literature exists on how to write readable code; how to create analytical models and automatically predict readability; and how readability influences software cost and eventually the economy. In this article we follow a different path; we explore the question of why and how unreadable code gets written. Moti...

Despite their significant limitations, readability measures that are easy to apply have definite appeal. With this in mind, we have been exploring the prospects for more insightful measures that are computer-based and, thereby, still easily applied. The orthodox reliance on intrinsic syntactic features is an inherent limitation of most readability measures, since they have no reference to the l...

STUDY DESIGN Analysis of spine-related patient education materials (PEMs) from subspecialty websites. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to assess the readability of spine-related PEMs and compare to readability data from 2008. SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA Many spine patients use the Internet for health information. Several agencies recommend that the readability of online PEMs should be no ...

BACKGROUND Quantitative tools have been developed to evaluate the readability of written documents and have been used in several studies to evaluate information and consent forms. These studies all showed that such documents had a low level of readability. Our objective is to evaluate the readability of Information and Consent Forms (ICFs) used in clinical research. METHODS AND FINDINGS Clini...