Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
15 results found in readability.
- Easy Read (Easy-to-Read, Easy Language, Plain Language for Cognitive Accessibility)
- A method of presenting written information in a way that is accessible to people with intellectual disabilities, learning difficulties, or low literacy. Easy Read uses short sentences, common everyday…
- Fixation Duration (Fixation Time, Gaze Duration)
- The length of time the eye remains relatively still on a specific point in a visual display during reading or visual processing. In eye-tracking research, fixation duration is a key metric for measuri…
- Flesch Reading Ease (Flesch Readability Score, Flesch Score, FRE)
- A readability formula developed by Rudolf Flesch in 1948 that rates text on a 100-point scale based on average sentence length and average number of syllables per word. Higher scores indicate easier-t…
- 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…
- Fluency (Text fluency, Grammatical fluency)
- In natural language processing and text simplification, fluency is the degree to which a piece of text is grammatically correct and reads naturally in the target language. It is one of three standard …
- Italic Font Style (italics, oblique)
- A slanted or cursive-style variant of a typeface, traditionally used for emphasis, titles, or foreign words. Eye-tracking research demonstrates that italic fonts create significant accessibility barri…
- Jenga Format
- Jenga format is a content transformation technique designed to enhance web page readability for non-native English readers. Developed by Chen-Hsiang Yu and Robert C. Miller at MIT, it restructures tex…
- Monospaced Font (fixed-width font, fixed-pitch font, non-proportional font)
- A typeface in which every character occupies the same horizontal space, regardless of its width. Examples include Courier, Consolas, and Monaco. Research shows monospaced fonts like Courier lead to sh…
- 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…
- Plain Language (Plain English, Clear Language, Simple Language)
- Plain language is communication that is clear, concise, and well-organized so that the intended audience can easily find, understand, and use the information. In accessibility, plain language is essen…
- Proportional Font (variable-width font)
- A typeface in which characters have varying widths based on their natural proportions—a narrow "i" takes less space than a wide "m". Most fonts used in everyday reading are proportional, including Ari…
- Sans-Serif Font (sans serif, grotesque font)
- A typeface that lacks the small projecting lines (serifs) at the ends of letter strokes. Sans-serif fonts like Arial, Helvetica, and Verdana are generally recommended for screen readability and are of…
- Serif Font (roman typeface)
- A typeface with small decorative lines or strokes (serifs) at the ends of letter strokes. Common serif fonts include Times New Roman, Garamond, and Georgia. While traditionally associated with print l…
- Text Complexity (Linguistic complexity, Text difficulty)
- The degree to which a piece of writing demands advanced reading skills to comprehend, driven by factors such as vocabulary frequency, syntactic structure, sentence length, passage organisation, and ba…
- Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting (VSTF)
- Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting (VSTF) is a content presentation method that formats text based on its syntactic structure, using indentation, line breaks, and visual grouping to align with the gramm…