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Communications and Marketing: Web Services

Web Content and Readability

Last modified: March 9, 2021
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UAMS Health wants to provide content for consumers and patients that is easy to understand. The UAMS Center for Health Literacy (CHL) outlines basic measures for creating content for this audience.

Effective content:

  • Is easy to access, understand, and act upon
  • Encourages self-engagement in one’s health
  • Results in better health outcomes

The CHL recommends that health content be edited to reach a reading difficulty level of easy, or around a 6th grade reading level. This can be achieved by writing web content using plain language.

Plain Language

Ensuring that users can easily read and understand the content on a website is an important element of web governance.

Plain language presents clear, concise information and avoids using unnecessary jargon or technical terms. Being direct and plainspoken is not talking down. It is clear communication. Plain language benefits the consumer and the organization.

The Consumer Audience and Plain Language

The consumer audience for UAMS Health does not have a medical degree. Even when one does have a medical degree, using plain language is still the best way to write web content.

If you must use technical terms that your target readers may not know, explain them first. What is considered simple and familiar varies, depending on your audience. For example, for general audiences, the word cut is common. For surgeons, incision might be equally as common, but not as easily understood by a general audience.

To simplify content and make it easier to read:

  • Use simple words (fewer syllables).
  • Keep sentences short.
  • Keep paragraphs short.
  • Use appropriate formatting, such as headings and lists, to make a topic easier to scan. 

Research supports the use of plain language for a patient and consumer audience.

Patients understand medical information better when spoken to slowly, simple words are used, and a restricted amount of information is presented. For optimal comprehension and compliance, patient education material should be written at a sixth-grade or lower reading level, preferably including pictures and illustrations. All patients prefer reading medical information written in dear and concise language. Physicians should be alert to this problem because most patients are unwilling to admit that they have literacy problems.

Safeer, R. S., & Keenan, J. (2005). Health literacy: the gap between physicians and patients. American family physician, 72(3), 463–468.

Readability Scores

UAMS web properties use a tool called SiteImprove to monitor things like accessibility, SEO and quality assurance. One part of SiteImprove is a readability score for each page’s content. The Flesch Kincaid Grade Level is a readability test designed for English text. The test uses polysyllabic words and long sentences. Part of a lower score is achieved by using plain language. Another element of a lower reading score is using shorter sentences.

It was developed to make it easier for parents and teachers to place reading content into appropriate reading age brackets for children. A score is returned which gives an indication of difficulty. This score can be related to the approximate US grade level needed to comprehend the text.

Understanding that the CHL recommends around a 6th-grade reading level for traditional patient education materials. For UAMSHealth.com, this includes content for conditions, treatments and procedures, areas of expertise, locations, etc.

Ongoing Maintenance and Management

Readability scores for pre-existing content on UAMSHealth.com may be higher than ideal. With regular maintenance and content revisions of existing pages, reading levels will be lowered.

It will take collaboration with internal clinical contributors to ensure that newly-produced content is presented plainly in a manner that is easy for consumers to read and understand.

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