Re: Diabetes websites too complicated

> 
> 
> This news item describes a study of the readability and understandability 
> of Diabetes web sites. Most require a reading age of 11 to 14 years while 
> that of the general population in the UK is (amazingly) nine years. There 

The first hit on Google for reading age is:

   Linkname: Readability and reading ages of school science text-books.
        URL: http://www.timetabler.com/reading.html

which has some quite useful general comments on text and typography,
but, in particular, points out that the reading age is the age at
which reading is 50% failing, meaning that, for easy comprehension,
one needs to aim a lot lower.  Also, reading age is based on the
median of the population, but there will be 50% of the population
that are worse.

I would agree, though, with the point that dumbing down risks losing
information.  (And can also demotivate those who can understand.)

> doesn't seem to be any mention of web accessibility guidelines.
> 
> BBC News article:
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3641634.stm

Note, with BBC news links, it is often better to replace /hi/ with /low/