Purpose
Writing at an 8th-grade reading level makes your website accessible to a wider audience. This approach helps everyone, from kids to adults, understand your content easily.
When to Use these Reading Level Resources:
Aim for an 8th-grade reading level for most of your website's content, especially in the following cases:
- Important Information: Such as forms, legal documents, and policies.
- Complex Topics: Simplify complicated ideas into clearer terms.
- General Website Content: Make your website accessible to a wider audience.
Why It Matters:
Writing at an 8th-grade reading level makes your website more inclusive, user-friendly, and optimized for search engines.
Accessibility Impact:
- People with Disabilities: Simplifies content for individuals with dyslexia, cognitive impairments, or other disabilities.
- Language Barriers: Simplifies complex language, making it more accessible to non-native English speakers.
User Experience Impact:
- Improved Comprehension: Clear and concise writing reduces cognitive load, making it easier for users to understand your content.
- Increased Engagement: Easy-to-read content keeps users engaged and reduces bounce rates.
- Faster Reading Time: Shorter sentences and simpler language allow users to quickly scan and absorb information.
SEO Benefits:
- Better Search Engine Rankings: Search engines prioritize content that is easy to understand and relevant to user queries.
- Increased Organic Traffic: By writing in plain language, you can attract a wider audience and improve your website's search visibility.
Reading Level Tools to Help:
You can use both of these tools to help you see what you reading level is and you can create content that is not only accessible but also effective in reaching and helping your target audience.
- Acquia Optimize Quality Assurance Scan: This tool can analyze your website's content and identify the reading level of your full site as well as give a list of the reading levels per page.
- Hemingway App Readability Scan: This free tool highlights complex sentences and suggests simpler alternatives where it will highlight the exact paragraph and words that need improvement.
How to find the Reading Level of Every Page
When you go to Acquia Optimize you can select your agency site to see the dashboard and from the top tool bar tabs you can select the Quality Assurance Tab and then within the right side menu you will select that Readability.
The Readability section within Aquia Optimize is is where you will be able to see the reading level of your site as a whole and underneath the reading level scroll you will also see a list results of all of the individual pages that fall within each reading level.
The goal is to have your whole site reading level at the 8th grade score and from the readability list that Acquia Optimize gives, you can select the "Pages" link beside each reading level and from there it will give you links to all of the individual pages that fall within that reading level.
How to Improve Your Pages' Reading Level
Within the edit section of your page that has been marked at a high reading level, you can select all of the body text and then navigate to the Hemmingway app where you can paste that text and it will highlight all of the areas within the text that need improvement.
You can make your edits to your text directly within Hemming way because they will make it super easy to see the new updated reading level from the new edits that you have made.
Once you've gotten your reading score down you can now paste your text back into the body field of your page on your agency site and save it.
We do have two great web accessibility writing resources available to you for help with understanding the "Basics of Good Web Writing" and "Writing for All People"