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 ...

Readability is defined as the “comprehensibility of written text” [2,3]. It has been measured by various formulae developed for materials written for native speakers of a language (L1), or materials designed for second and/or foreign language students (L2). According to Brown et al. [4], being used with L1 texts, readability formulae provide a numerical index that estimates the reading difficul...

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...

The readability assessment deals with estimating the level of difficulty in reading texts.Many readability tests, which do not indicate execution efficiency, have been applied on specific texts to measure the reading grade level in science textbooks. In this paper, we analyze the content covered in elementary school Turkish textbooks by employing a distributed parallel processing framework base...

METHODS: All top-rated tweets (as per Twitter algorithm) under #PlasticSurgery in January 2017 were retrospectively reviewed. Data from tweets with links to full, open access and society/ institutional patient information articles were extracted. Content and identity of the person tweeting was assessed. Readability was analyzed using established tests: Coleman-Liau, Flesch-Kincaid, Flesch Readi...

This paper examines the readability of the chairman’s narratives, as determined by the Flesch score, of a Malaysian public listed company’s corporate reports from 1962 to 2009. It partially supports earlier studies which demonstrated that corporate reports were difficult to read, and had shown very negligible decrease in difficulty over time. Net profit to sales and readability was significantl...

This paper investigates two strategies for collecting readability assessments, an Expert Readers application intended to collect fine-grained readability assessments from language experts and a Sort by Readability application designed to be intuitive and open for everyone having internet access. We show that the data sets resulting from both annotation strategies are very similar. We conclude t...