What Is Readability?
Wikipedia describes "readability" as "the ease with which a reader can understand a written text." In other words, readability measures how easy it is to understand your content. Readability affects several aspects of content, including the reader's comprehension, reading speed, and the mental effort required to read the text. A text with poor readability can be hard to read and understand. The person trying to read may have to exert more mental effort and eventually experience mental strain. In extreme cases, a person may need to read a sentence multiple times before they finally make sense of it. But if the readability is good enough, the text becomes easy to read and comprehend with minimal effort. Readers can breeze through passages with maximum understanding, making the experience enjoyable rather than tiring.
Why Is Readability Important For Online Learning Content?
Readability is especially important for academic writing and learning content because the entire purpose of the content is to help readers understand something. If readability is low, it directly impacts the learning material's effectiveness at delivering the intended lesson.
Poorly written or difficult to read content shifts a learner's focus away from the lesson. Instead of absorbing new information, they end up struggling to understand the text. Students or learners may also feel discouraged from reading further and engaging with the material. If the experience is too poor, they might just step back and leave the content unread. But if the readability is high, reading becomes enjoyable, and students stay focused on the lesson being conveyed, rather than making out the exact text or understanding its intended meaning.
What Affects Readability?
Before we learn how to improve readability, we need to understand what affects it in the first place. A text's readability is affected by two main types of aspects:
- Visual aspects, such as font and background color.
- Language complexity, such as the word choice.
Here are ten main factors that affect the readability of a piece of written content, both visually and in terms of language:
- Font
- Font size
- Font color and background color
- White space
- Word choice
- Transitions between ideas
- Sentence length
- Paragraph length
- Sentence voice
- Information density
1. Font
One of the key factors that affects the readability of a text is the font used and its size. Many websites make poor design choices when choosing their font and adjusting its size.
The font itself carries readability, because text is always written in some font. But different fonts have different readability levels. Some fonts are purely designed for aesthetic or artistic purposes, such as an overly fancy, artistic, or scary-looking font. These fonts tend to have very poor legibility, well, because they're not designed for reading to begin with. Take Inspiration by Robert Leuschke as an example.
Reading paragraphs in this font would surely be painful to the eyes. Now I'm sure most people would avoid using fonts like these for paragraph reading. But some fonts seem like they could work well for paragraph reading, but they're not actually optimized for this purpose. This might offend some designers, but the renowned Gill Sans and Helvetica Neue are good examples of such fonts.
2. Font Size
The size matters as much as the font. It's because different fonts appear differently in size. Some are naturally smaller or larger than others, so they require different size settings to be comfortable to read. Take the example of Garamond and Roboto when both are set to 18 points in Google Docs.
Although both fonts are excellent for paragraph text, because they have high readability, and are set to the same size, Garamond appears much smaller compared to Roboto. It can be uncomfortable for longer reading sessions, hence its size should be increased for readers' comfort.
Learning platforms need to make sure they follow readability standards to make reading comfortable for readers. Otherwise, even if a font has high readability, a smaller-than-usual size can make it equally hard to read as a bad font.
If you don't know which font to choose and what size to set, you can always consult a professional designer to make the right choice for your online learning content. You can also use online tools for font testing and reach out to online typography-related communities for help.
3. Font And Background Color
Have you ever read white text on a fully black background for a while and then felt like the text was getting blurry and appearing glowy? This visual phenomenon is called the glow effect or the blur/glare effect.
Blur effect while reading usually occurs due to a very sharp contrast between the text and the background. It's common in long reading sessions involving neon colors, or more commonly, pure white text over pure black background. It strains the eyes and makes reading tiring because the text starts to feel glowy and as if it's blending into the background, making it appear blurry to read.
On the flip side, color combos with low contrast cause the brain to strain when it tries to separate letter shapes from the background. The letters blend into the page, forcing you to strain your eyes just to finish a sentence.
That's why you should avoid using the wrong combos of colors for your font and its background. Here are some examples of both bad and good color combinations:
Bad Color Combos
- Pure White (#FFFFFF) on Pure Black (#000000)
This is a classic misuse of colors. It's too sharp for prolonged reading. - Neon or bright hues on dark backgrounds
Colors like electric blue, neon green, or magenta on a true black background. - Highly saturated complementary colors
Using colors for text and backgrounds that sit opposite on the color wheel, such as red text on a green background or blue text on an orange background. - Light gray text on a white background
This combo has very little contrast and can easily make reading difficult.
Good Color Combos
- Black text on an off-white or cream background
This is the perfect classic. The off-white background is gentle on the eyes and prevents the harsh screen glare that comes from pure white. - Dark navy blue text on a soft yellow background
This has high contrast but appears warm. The dark blue stands out clearly without looking aggressive.
Always aim for high contrast using dark text on a light background, or muted white text on a dark background, for optimal reading.
4. White Space
White space is the space around the text, or any graphical element. Not many people know this, but white space can influence readability a lot. I'll keep this short, but white space is something that gives "breathing" space to the visual elements you see on your screen.
You may have never noticed this, but good designs always follow this essential design principle, which you can notice when reading a book, a webpage, a restaurant menu, or a brochure. But poor designs also exist, and one of the bad design choices websites make is that they ignore the white space in their written content, which either ends up being negligible or sometimes too much.
Online learning platforms are usually highly focused on delivering the learning material only. They often ignore small choices such as white space, and so their written content ends up looking congested, making it harder for learners to absorb the material. So keep a balance of white space between the text's lines, paragraphs, and columns for optimal readability.
5. Word Choice
Language-related aspects matter as much as visual ones when it comes to readability. One of the factors responsible for readability is the text's word choice. The kind of words you choose to convey the message makes a difference. It makes a difference because some words are easier to read because of their simplicity compared to other, more complex words, which are harder to read.
What hits even harder is a word that the reader is unfamiliar with. The use of unfamiliar and/or overly fancy words leads to a phenomenon called cognitive friction. It happens when a reader hits an unfamiliar, overly complex, or poorly fitted word, breaking their flow of reading. They stop processing the sentence as a whole and start to micro-analyze the individual words.
In other words, readers become distracted from the greater message. They may have to repeat the sentence, sometimes several times, to finally understand its meaning. If they're completely unfamiliar with the word, they may simply not understand the sentence's meaning at all. Some curious minds might start Googling the meaning, which can distract them further. But if you use simpler words that most people are familiar with and words that don't break the text's flow, you can make your online learning content easier to read and understand.
6. Transitions Between Ideas
The overall flow of text also contributes to readability. It concerns transitions between ideas and the length of sentences. Transitions act as the psychological bridges between sentences, paragraphs, and sections. They connect ideas and make their relation clearer to readers. Our minds also constantly seek logical reasoning and connections between ideas to make sense of them.
But if you jump from Point A to Point B without a bridge in writing, the reader's brain has to freeze, look backward, and figure out the missing link, which obstructs their flow of reading and comprehension. That's why ideas need clear transitions for better readability.
7. Sentence Length
The length of a sentence also affects the flow. Sentence length determines how much data a reader has to hold in their working memory before they reach a period and can finally process the complete thought.
Overly lengthy sentences can sometimes make it harder to understand the point, because the reader usually forgets how the sentence started by the time they reach the end. They have to reread the sentence to piece together its ending and beginning. On the flip side, overly short sentences create monotony and don't create a flow of reading, which can make content feel boring and robotic to read.
8. Paragraph Length
If sentences are short, lengthy paragraphs can make the text overwhelming. A long paragraph can give the "wall of text" effect to readers and look like a chore. Readers tend to subconsciously reject dense blocks of text because they can't easily find their place if their eyes wander.
Text needs a balanced length. It helps increase its readability and make it easier to understand. Online learning content especially benefits from clear writing because clarity of meaning is one of its most essential requirements.
9. Sentence Voice
A sentence can use active voice writing or passive voice writing. Active voice sentences are more direct and immediately tell you about who or what is doing the action, whereas passive voice sentences are indirect and talk about the action being done first.
For example, "Sarah painted the box" is an active voice sentence. It's clear who painted the box from the beginning of the sentence. "The box was painted by Sarah." is a passive voice sentence. The doer of the action only becomes clear at the end.
Using too many passive voice sentences is considered a bad writing habit in general. Passive voice sentences force your brain to wait till the very end to figure out who's doing the action being done. Learners have to mentally rearrange the order of operations to understand the sentence.
These sentences affect readability because the brain is forced to use extra working memory just to untangle the grammar. Compared to passive voice sentences, active voice makes learning much smoother. The ideas are easier to visualize and understand when they're conveyed directly.
10. Information Density
An information overload happens when you stuff too much information in a single phrase or sentence, often using brackets and punctuation marks. This is a rather common practice of academic writing where writers try to qualify everything at once. It leads to loaded clauses filled with secondary data, shortened forms, and inserted thoughts.
An information dump creates cognitive overload on the mind, which can obstruct comprehension. The reader loses track of the sentence's main idea by the time they're done reading the subpoints. This is essentially a flaw in readability because the reader has to read too much at once. You could deliver the same points without making them hard to understand by stating one idea per sentence and introducing the supporting details separately.
Conclusion
Readability helps academic content deliver its message effectively to readers. But if content isn't optimized for readability, it may be hard to read and understand, which ultimately affects the delivery of the lessons. That said, increasing your academic text's readability isn't difficult. You just need to make the right design choices, such as choosing the right font, its size, color, background color, and the white space surrounding it, as well as use simple vocabulary and a balanced writing style to support easy reading.
