An important part of usability and accessibility is the reading ease of text. Especially when designing content for educational media, we have to make sure that the reading level of the text meets the respective target audiences. We test all the text that we write for educational children’s media against the following tests:

Spache - useful for primary age (Kindergarten to 7th grade) readers to help classify school textbooks and literature. Also defined a list of difficult words.
Powers, Sumner, Kearl - useful for most text geared towards primary age (Kindergarten to 7th grade) readers.
Fry - useful for most text, including literature and technical documents.
Coleman-Liau - useful for secondary age (4th grade to college level) readers. This formula is based on text from the .4 to 16.3 grade level range.

Any educational project should always address the ease of reading. By taking the average of these readability formulas, we determine the reading ease of our scripts.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 11:09 am and is filed under Accessibility, Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.