Here is another web accessibility recommendation that is listed under PWAG Maturity Stage 2-6. The equivalent World Wide Web Consortium Web Content Accessibility Guideline 1.0 (W3C WCAG)for this is:
Priority 1 - 14.1 - Use the clearest and simplest language appropriate for a site's content.
Although web documents are primarily written in English, still we cannot assume that everybody understands the content of our websites. Try to make your site as easy to comprehend as possible.
Avoid using jargons or words that only relates to a specific activity, profession, or group like medical profession, engineering terms, etc. Make your website appealing to a greater number of users by using simple to understand, commonly used and terse words and phrases.
We can measure the level of understanding our documents. This is called Readability Test. It is the Mathematical computation of how easy it is to read and understand a document. Readability tests were first developed in the 1920s in the United States. They are mathematical formulas designed to know what books are suitable for American students at a certain age or grade level. This process was intended to make it easier for teachers, librarians and publishers to determine whether a book can be understood by its intended audience.
The formulas are based around the average words to a sentence, and the average syllables used per word. As such, they tend to reward short sentences made up of short words.
There are three popular American designed Readability tests. These are:
You can visit the Juicy Studio website to test the readability of your content:
http://juicystudio.com/services/readability.php
Simply type your site address and click on "Calculate Readability" button. The Reading Level Results will then be computed and shown to you.
You may also use another Online Readability Test specifically for blogs. It tells what level of education is required to understand your blog. Please note that the lower the level, the better it is for your website.
http://www.criticsrant.com/bb/reading_level.aspx
For some educated ones, especially those who are very familiar with the English language, they tend to overdo the way they write. They use high sounding words to impress others. However, the key here is to convey information. If the information is hidden somewhere between those wordy sentences, then we are not doing our objective.
Here are some few tips in making your site readable: