- From: Silas S. Brown <ssb22@cam.ac.uk>
- Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 09:38:44 +0000
- To: "jonathan chetwynd" <jonathan@signbrowser.free-online.co.uk>, jay@peepo.com
- CC: w3c-wai-er-ig@w3.org
> measurement is the basis of science. I understand what you mean but you really do have to be careful that you're measuring what you really want to measure. You may prove anything by figures. And I'm not convinced that a simple word-counting algorithm can reliably say how easy it is to understand a page. Eg. the word 'incomprehensibilities' has 21 letters but most English people know what it means. But the word 'wan' has three letters and I'm surprised how many people don't know it (or at least have to think). And what about this: "One day Tanya went for a walk", etc etc (story mentioning Tanya hundreds of times). Suppose Tanya is not considered to be one of the words in the limited vocabulary, and the author gets told off for using it so much? That kind of thing would be enough to put me off using such a tool. I can see that there would be a loose correlation between the understandability of a document to a particular group of people and its statistics, but this does not mean that a statistics tool can label a document "guaranteed readable" or "guaranteed unreadable" with 100% accuracy. There is a danger in that authors might make changes to decrease their difficulty level according to the tool, but in so doing actually render the document harder to understand because they are using an unreliable tool. You can't have science without measurement, but there are so many variables here. You wouldn't be able to do much science if the only instrument you had gave you a single reading, being the average of temperature, pressure, current, voltage, weight etc. But if you had lots of instruments and you don't understand science, you'd be bewildered. I think the best test of "is a page easy to understand" is to try it out on someone. Regards -- Silas S Brown, St John's College Cambridge UK http://epona.ucam.org/~ssb22/ "They get caught by the ideas that they have thought up" - Psalm 10:2
Received on Thursday, 4 March 1999 04:38:54 UTC