The Lister Hill Center is working to develop technologies that will allow health care providers, health educators, medical librarians, and others assess whether health and medical documents are likely to be understood by their intended audiences. These technologies will provide measures that will assess the text difficulty of health and medical documents and assist health care providers determine the suitability of health-related documents for consumers with various literacy levels.

Classic readability formulas such as the SMOG Readability Formula and the Fry Readability Scale use simple algorithms to estimate reading level of text for all disciplines. While useful, these formulas do not take into account medical terms and linguistic factors that affect consumer understanding and comprehension of health and medical documents.

Readability research seeks to understand the role of medical terms and linguistic factors in determining the understandability of health and medical documents. Lister Hill Center's Readability Analyzer is a tool under development that implements several classic readability formulas. Researchers are able to compare the results from the formulas to determine the impact of health and medical termonlogy on consumer understanding. Additional features will be added to the Readability Analyzer based on further research. Readability Analyzer modifications will be validated using a test set of documents representing various genres of health-related materials.

Ultimately, the Readability Analyzer tool may be useful, not only for matching readers with literacy-appropriate texts, but also for helping authors tailor the readability of health information for specific consumer audiences.