language and tool results

Hi James, Sharron, and all,

We might want to caution folks not to get too hung up on the HemingwayApp results.

I was a surprised at the HemingwayApp results on some of the WAI content. I've been experimenting with it and the content from https://w3c.github.io/accessibility-intro/ I tried several types of edits on the first section to get better results -- which didn't do much -- and then tried the lists -- bingo.

An example issue with HemingwayApp results is inline lists.

Starting text: "The Web is fundamentally designed to work for all people, whatever their hardware, software, language, culture, location, or physical or mental ability. When the Web meets this goal, it is accessible to people with a diverse range of hearing, movement, sight, and cognitive ability."
- Grade 10
- 1 of 3 sentences is hard to read
- 1 of 3 sentence is very hard to read
The whole thing is highlighted. :(

Deleting lists (which we wouldn't do here -- this is to show how much impact just a list has):
"The Web is fundamentally designed to work for all people, whatever their hardware. When the Web meets this goal, it is accessible to people with a diverse range of cognitive ability."
- Grade 6
- 0 of 3 sentences is hard to read
- 0 of 3 sentence is very hard to read
For this paragraph, the lists alone were adding 4 grade levels and giving the highlighted "hard to read"s.

Changing in-line lists to bullets:
"The Web is fundamentally designed to work for all people, whatever their:
* hardware
* software
* language
* culture
* location
* physical or mental ability
When the Web meets this goal, it is accessible to people with a diverse range of:
* hearing
* movement
* sight
* cognitive ability
"
- Grade 5 (taking out "fundamentally" dropped it to 4)
- 0 of 13 sentences is hard to read
- 0 of 13 sentence is very hard to read

For this specific paragraph, my perspective is that we do *not* want to bullet out at least the first list -- because it is a very minor point of the overall page -- just setting the stage, and we don't want them emphasized.

---

If someone just looks at HemingwayApp results on this paragraph, they could critique it. However, the inline lists are the main cause of high reading level and highlighted sentences, and those are OK in this case.

But maybe others won't get hung up about it so no need to say anything. :-)

~Shawn

Received on Friday, 28 July 2017 17:12:36 UTC