Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
12 results found in Literacy.
- Dale-Chall Readability Formula (Dale-Chall, New Dale-Chall)
- A readability formula first published by Edgar Dale and Jeanne Chall in 1948 and revised in 1995. Unlike formulas that rely only on surface counts, Dale-Chall compares every word in a text against a m…
- Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (Flesch-Kincaid, FKGL, Flesch-Kincaid readability)
- A readability formula that estimates the U.S. school grade level required to comfortably read a given English text, based on average sentence length and average syllables per word. Developed for the U…
- Functional Literacy (Functional illiteracy)
- The level of reading and writing skill needed to handle everyday tasks — filling out forms, reading medication instructions, understanding a utility bill, using a web service. Adults below this thresh…
- Illiteracy (Functional Illiteracy, Low Literacy)
- The inability to read or write, or having reading and writing skills below a functional level needed for everyday tasks. In the context of digital accessibility, illiteracy and low literacy present si…
- Lexile Framework (Lexile, Lexile Measure)
- A commercial readability framework developed by MetaMetrics that places both texts and readers on a common scale — the Lexile measure — to support matching readers with materials at an appropriate lev…
- Literacy Bias (Literacy bias of a metric)
- In accessibility research methodology, a literacy bias describes the phenomenon where an evaluation metric systematically produces different scores for participants with different reading-literacy lev…
- Newsela
- An educational content platform that publishes news articles in multiple professionally-edited versions simplified to different U.S. school reading levels, enabling teachers to assign the same story a…
- Reading Fluency
- The ability to read connected text accurately, at an appropriate pace, and with proper expression - distinct from word-level decoding skill on one side and from reading comprehension on the other. Flu…
- Reading Level (Grade Level, Reading Grade Level)
- An estimate of the education or skill level a reader needs to understand a text, usually expressed as a U.S. school grade (e.g., grade 4) or an equivalent band. Reading level is the target output of m…
- Score Prediction (Predicted grade, Comprehension self-prediction)
- A subjective-response evaluation item in which a research participant, immediately after reading a passage and before learning their actual comprehension-question score, estimates the percentage of qu…
- Synthetic Phonics (Phonics, Systematic Phonics)
- A method of teaching reading that emphasises learning the sounds (phonemes) associated with letters and letter combinations, then blending those sounds together to form words. Unlike analytic phonics,…
- Wide-Range Achievement Test (WRAT, WRAT-5, WRAT sentence comprehension)
- A standardised achievement test used to measure basic academic skills, including word reading, sentence comprehension, spelling, and math computation. In accessibility research, the WRAT sentence-comp…