A Computer-Based Readability Analysis of Consumer Materials on the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association Website

Purpose: The authors of this article examined the readability of audiology- and speech- language pathology-related consumer materials on the website of the American-Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) and reported their findings rela- tive to the reading grade-level guidelines recommend- ed by health literacy experts. Method: A search was conducted on the ASHA web- site to find online audiology- and speech-language pathology-related content for consumers. The website listed consumer resources under a home page link titled Information For: The Public. The readability of each document resource was determined using a Win- dows-based software: Readability Calculations version 7.5 (Micro Power and Light, 2008). Two hundred and twenty-five documents were loaded into the software for analysis. The documents were ordered alphabeti- cally with Flesch Reading Ease (FRE; Flesch, 1948)