Free Resources from the Net for EVERY Learner

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff!

FREE online resources and downloadable programs for learners and their teachers.

I presented an after school workshop for teachers on blogging this week, and I was challenged there by a question about the reading level of blogs and websites. That led to a quick search for an online tool to measure reading level. My search brought me to Juicy Studio, and I’ve decided to write about it here. Juicy Studio offers a convenient online tool for measuring reading level–and a great deal more!

Juicy Studio This website, which can be switched easily to a high contrast version for readers with visual challenges, offers tools for measuring several aspects of website accessibility. Free hosted services include the Readability Test, CSS Analyser, Luminosity Contrast Ratio Analyser, Colour Contrast Analyser, Image Analyser, and Link Analyser. The site also offers several downloadable tools and Firefox extensions designed to facilitate and enhance website accessibility. As well, the site hosts a growing collection of articles related to web accessibility. Anyone wanting to build accessible websites, which should ideally include all site developers, needs to be aware of Juicy Studio.

I’m going to focus here briefly only on the tool for testing reading level. It couldn’t be easier to use Juicy Studio’s readability test. You simply paste in the URL and click “Calculate Readability”.

When I entered the URL for this blog, it took less than a minute to return the chart below after analysing the first page of my blog, including my 10 most recent posts. The chart was followed by a helpful explanation of the three measures at the bottom of the chart. The Gunning Fox suggests that a reader needs over 11 years of schooling to understand my blog. Flesch Reading Ease is a scale to 100, with higher scores being easier. Writers are encouraged to aim between 60 and 70. By this scale, my content is a little on the difficult side. The Flesch-Kincaid Grade measure is another rough estimate of how many years of schooling a reader should need to comprehend the material.

Juicy Studio explains the algorithm for each of the scales in considerable more detail than I did above. It strikes me that it would be difficult to come up with anything more accurate. It is helpful that the test uses three separate scales and that it breaks down the data so clearly.