Juicy Studio offers an interesting service that allows the user to “calculate” the readability of a web site. Readability is an estimate of the difficulty of text and various indexes use word or sentence length and similar quantitative variables to estimate difficulty. I have done reading research during my career and I do know that there are “issues” with simple quantitative approaches. However, the concept is interesting and the variables provide a useful starting point for analysis.
I applied this tool to one of our online book chapter summaries (Chapter 2) and learned that the document was written at the level of “academic paper.” Of course, this would have been our intent.
