Writing Inclusively
This week in class, we learned about Accessibility, Usability, and Inclusion. I ran the text from my earlier blog post through the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Calculator, and it appears that my blog is not likely to be comprehensible for most average web users. I feel like this is because most of the blogs are commenting on a college-level course. In the lecture this week, our teacher cited the Center for Plain Language and its statistic that "the average web user can understand English content at about a seventh-grade level," but advises writers to write at a fourth or fifth-grade level. I wasn't even sure how to write at a fifth-grade reading level.
The statistic took me aback so much that I went down a rabbit hole on the Center for Plain Language website. While some of the links didn't work, one led to a UK government website on Content design: planning, writing and managing content which provided some fascinating information about how people read.
By the time a child is five or six years old, they have a vocabulary of up to 5,000 words. These words will be more recognizable to adults than words they learned after that age. By nine years of age, a "common words" vocabulary is formed—the initial 5,000 words and a secondary set of 10,000 more words.
If a writer uses long words consisting of 8-9 letters, readers are more likely to skip the shorter words written after them—the more long words used, the more words skipped overall.
The 5,000 "common words" that the children initially learn are ones that they quickly become familiar with reading. "They then stop reading these words and start recognizing their shapes." This happens at 9 years old. They also bounce around while reading, anticipating words and filling in the blanks.
According to the UK website, "your brain can drop up to 30% of the test and still understand." Not every word needs to be read to understand what you are reading.
Context matters, and longer words can be read as easily as shorter words if the context is easily understood.
Shorter sentences are more beneficial for some individuals with learning disabilities, as they often struggle to read by scanning. Instead, they read each letter of the word. Using common words helps people with learning disabilities to understand longer sentences if shorter sentences can't be written.
By providing clear information and using everyday language, we're helping people read more efficiently and understand information in the most effective way possible.
All of the information learned this week helped with writing this blog post, and I managed to bring the level of this post down a couple of grade levels. It also helped me to realize that when visually impaired people are on this blog, they need descriptions for any images. I didn't realize that the screen readers would just say "blank" for an image. I went back and added descriptions for images used on my previous blogs so that screen readers would be able to describe the images.
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