- From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 07:12:06 +0100 (BST)
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
>
>
> 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/
Received on Wednesday, 15 September 2004 06:12:39 UTC