Make sure your content is understandable
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Have others check your content
Test your content to make sure your content is easy to read and understand:
- Ask colleagues who aren't familiar with the subject to review the text for clarity and logic
- Work with your communications team to set up usability testing for your content
Tips to improve understanding
To improve understanding of your content:
- Shorten words, sentences or paragraphs, but keep words of 3 or more syllables if they're well known
- Replace technical jargon with terms that people will understand
- Remove details that people don't need to complete the task
- Replace secondary references to a program with "program" rather than using its full name or abbreviation
- Create numbered or bulleted lists for key tasks
Don’t rely on readability tools
Readability tools are based on algorithms that measure things like word length. These tools cannot tell you if your audience will find your content easy to understand and use.
Readability tools can be a helpful first step to identify some areas that need work, such as:
- overly long sentences
- passive voice
- unnecessary words
- acronyms
They can also suggest simpler alternatives and give you a rough sense of the complexity of a text. But you shouldn't use these tools to evaluate readability accurately. However, you can use them to help demonstrate why text should be simplified or shortened.
Examples of readability tools
Flesch-Kincaid tool
Flesch-Kincaid uses a formula to determine the number of years of education needed to understand the text. In Microsoft Word, use the Editor tool under the Review tab to access the Document stats that will give you the Flesch-Kincaid result for your document.
Flesch-Kincaid evaluates English content only. French content uses the Kandel-Moles readability formula.
Hemingway app
The Hemingway app checks sentence length, complexity and reading levels of your content.
Usability Performance Dashboard (UPD)
For content that is already published on Canada.ca, you can use the Usability Performance Dashboard (UPD) to check the reading level of any CRA web page.
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