Library Launching Its Readability Service
Julie Schiavo, EDD, MLIS, AHIP, Assistant Director, Dental Services & Chandler Smith, MA, Education Librarian
LSUHSC Libraries recently announced the launch of its Readability service. This service assists faculty, staff and students with creating text and documents that are understandable to its desired audience. This is done by the librarians utilizing a software known as Readable that scores text on reading level and complexity analysis.
Some examples of content that can be submitted to LSUHSC Libraries to assess readability are:
- Informed consent documents for clinical trials
- Lay summaries for IACUC or lay grant-reviewing boards
- Patient-facing documents.
Readability is a measure of how easy content is to read. Some of the elements that go into a document’s “readability” are sentence length, complexity, subject matter, typography, etc. The goal of making content more readable in the health sciences context is to make the content more accessible and usable to a general audience, ensuring that your content is better understood.
If you are interested in learning more or utilizing this service, please contact any of the librarians listed on the Readability service page. From there, we will take your content, (please, no PDFs, Word documents preferred) and use the Readable software to help assess the content and provide suggestions and feedback. Readable will also generate a report that we will give to you as a part of this process.
Please reach out us at reference@lsuhsc.edu with any questions about this service.
For more information about Readability, please visit our LibGuide.