READABILITY OF A SAMPLE OF SPANISH NURSING WEBSITES

Introduction:
To ensure access to information is essential that it can be easily understood by individuals. Legibility is the set of typographical features of language and written text which can be read and understood easily. The linguistic clarity, 'readability' is what the text message language looks like. Readability is conditioned by the linguistic structure of the text, the grammatical constructions, the type, the size and the meaning of words and phrases used.

Since 1930, several readability formulas have been used to measure the difficulty of texts in quantitative terms. Rudolf Franz Flesch developed the formula for analyzing the readability language, "Reading Ease Score" (RES) for texts written in English language. In 1959, Fernandez Huerta validated and adapted the original formula RES Flesch in the field of teaching, creating the 'Huerta Reading Ease' (HRE).

Aim:
To know the readability of a sample of Spanish nursing websites with the Huerta Reading Ease.

Methods:
Readability assessment of a sample of 259 Spanish nursing websites.

To assess readability of the texts in Spanish language, we chose the online auto-tool "TxReadability" developed by the Accessibility Institute of the University of North Texas (USA). This tool is valid and free. The main result of this calculation is the automatic HRE. This numerical value is interpreted as the difficulty of readability ranges set by the author. The qualifications of the Huerta Reading Easy Score vary between 0 and 100, interpreting 0 as the most difficult and 100 as the easiest to read. A score under 30 is considered very difficult while a score over 60 is considered appropriate for adult readers.

For each web page of the sample we have determined the rate of Flesch adapted to Spanish.

Results:
According to the Huerta Reading Ease obtained with the tool automatically TxReadability, the sample is divided into 193 websites readable against 66 websites not legible.

According to the Huerta Reading Easy Score, the sample is divided into 7 levels of difficulty in reading. The largest percentage of websites (26.3%) was related to an easy level of difficulty in reading. The level remains moderately easy with a 22.4% and the standard level with a 13.5%. It is considered a 7.3% level of websites moderately difficult followed with a difficult level of 11.6%. At the difficulty level of difficulty in reading, a 12.4% of the websites was very easy while a 6.6% was very difficult.

Conclussions:
1.- There are different tools which are valid, free and easy to handle to know the readability of a website on the Internet.

2.- Although the vast majority of websites are readable, it is required to improve readability for the user to easily understand Spanish nursing web information.

References:
The Accessibility Institute, University of Texas at Austin. TxReadability: a Multilanguage readability tool [Internet]. Austin: The Accessibility Institute; [last access 25th November 2008]. Available at:
http://www.utexas.edu/disability/ai/resource/readability/manual/huerta-calculate-Spanish.html.