An empirical study on the preferred size of the participant information sheet in research

Background: Informed consent is a requirement for all research. It is not, however, clear how much information is sufficient to make an informed decision about participation in research. Information on an online questionnaire about childhood development was provided through an unfolding electronic participant sheet in three levels of information. \ud Methods: 552 participants, who completed the web-based survey, accessed and spent time reading the participant information sheet (PIS) between July 2008 and November 2009. The information behaviour of the participants was investigated. The first level contained less information than might be found on a standard PIS, the second level corresponded to a standard PIS, and the third contained more information than on a standard PIS. The actual time spent on reading the information provided in three incremental levels and the participants' evaluation of the information were calculated. \ud Results: 77% of the participants chose to access the first level of information, whereas 12% accessed the first two levels, 6% accessed all three levels of information and 23% participated without accessing information. The most accessed levels of information were those that corresponded to the average reading times. \ud Conclusion: The brief information provided in the first level was sufficient for participants to make informed decisions, while a sizeable minority of the participants chose not to access any information at all. This study adds to the debate about how much information is required to make a decision about participation in research and the results may help inform the future development of information sheets by providing data on participants' actual needs when deciding about questionnaire surveys.\u

Automated Readability Assessment for Spanish e-Government Information

This paper automatically evaluates the readability of Spanish e-government websites. Specifically, the websites collected explain e-government administrative procedures. The evaluation is carried out through the analysis of different linguistic characteristics that are presumably associated with a better understanding of these resources. To this end, texts from websites outside the government websites have been collected. These texts clarify the procedures published on the Spanish Government"s websites. These websites constitute the part of the corpus considered as the set of easy documents. The rest of the corpus has been completed with counterpart documents from government websites. The text of the documents has been processed, and the difficulty is evaluated through different classic readability metrics. At a later stage, automatic learning methods are used to apply algorithms to predict the difficulty of the text. The results of the study show that government web pages show high values for comprehension difficulty. This work proposes a new Spanish-language corpus of official e-government websites. In addition, a large number of combined linguistic attributes are applied, which improve the identification of the level of comprehensibility of a text with respect to classic metrics.Work supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness, (CSO2017-86747-R)

The Readability and Usability of Building User Guides

Building user guides are intended to inform building occupants about the building systems within their workplace. They are created to describe and document all the necessary information pertaining to the buildings operation, maintenance, management and basic trouble shooting procedures. They have been found to be useful, as building systems are becoming increasingly complex. There is evidence to suggest that the Building User Guides are designed at a level that is too technical and too difficult to use for the average building user and that they are therefore not doing their job. This research evaluates how easily building occupants are able to read and use building user guides, that have been designed for use in green buildings (where they can contribute to the building’s New Zealand Green Building Council’s sustainability rating). Twenty-three Building User Guides by a range of firms and writers were sampled from all over the country. The building user guides were assessed for their readability and how easy they are to use. Their readability level was assessed using the Simple Measure of Gobbledegook (SMOG) as a basic measure of readability, while a second measure, a word frequency profiler was used to assess the vocabulary needed to read current building user guides. A usability study was completed through a user survey. This was completed by 47 respondents. The survey used both a Performance Test and a Text Evaluation Questionnaire to assess the building user guide’s usability. The readability study found that the building user guides were written at a level that meant the majority of New Zealanders would struggle to comprehend. The constant use of technical language and jargon present in the building user guides detracted from the overall readability of the document that. A consequence of these results would be the users failing to understand aspects of a building user guides. Furthermore, this could lead to the incorrect use of a building’s services, which in turn could affect the efficient use of GreenStar rated buildings and their performance in practice. The usability study found that users were capable of finding some set information within the building user guide. Of the tested aspects in the usability survey it was found that the contents page had the biggest impact on the participant’s perception of usability. Other key aspects found that would increase the usability include: bolder headings, a clearer layout, the addition of a frequently asked question section as well as the ability for the building user guide to be searched for key words. A set of guidelines were developed from the findings of this research, for future building user guides to follow

Assessment and revision of a paediatric diagnostic audiology report

Optimising outcomes for children with hearing impairment (HI) requires a family centred approach that prioritises parent involvement. Families must be provided with information to encourage participation; and meet their need for emotional support and knowledge. Diagnostic audiology reports can help provide this information, but their delivery alone is insufficient. If these reports are not readable and comprehendible they cannot meet national and international legal standards, nor can they support the health literacy of parents. The majority of New Zealand adults have insufficient health literacy skills, a concerning fact given the strong association between poor health literacy and negative health outcomes. The aim of this study was to evaluate a paediatric diagnostic audiology report, revise it and verify the revision. A mock audiology report was evaluated via a readability analysis and semi-structured interviews with parent participants. Results confirmed that the report was difficult to read and understand. Next, the report was revised using best practice guidelines and parental recommendations. Verification of the revision process with 32 participants revealed that parents who read the revised report had significantly greater comprehension, self-efficacy and perception ratings than parents who read the unrevised report. Additionally, the report’s readability was markedly improved. These results may have critical implications for parents and their children with HI. Incomprehensible audiology reports fail to support parental health literacy, promote understanding, encourage participation or offer emotional support. Because knowledge is power for these families, it is hoped that the findings of this study will be recognised and implemented into clinical practice

Simplifying, reading, and machine translating health content: an empirical investigation of usability

Text simplification, through plain language (PL) or controlled language (CL), is adopted to increase readability, comprehension and machine translatability of (health) content. Cochrane is a non-profit organisation where volunteer authors summarise and simplify health-related English texts on the impact of treatments and interventions into plain language summaries (PLS), which are then disseminated online to the lay audience and translated. Cochrane’s simplification approach is non-automated, and involves the manual checking and implementation of different sets of PL guidelines, which can be an unsatisfactory, challenging and time-consuming task. This thesis examined if using the Acrolinx CL checker to automatically and consistently check PLS for readability and translatability issues would increase the usability of Cochrane’s simplification approach and, more precisely: (i) authors’ satisfaction; and (ii) authors’ effectiveness in terms of readability, comprehensibility, and machine translatability into Spanish. Data on satisfaction were collected from twelve Cochrane authors by means of the System Usability Scale and follow-up preference questions. Readability was analysed through the computational tool Coh-Metrix. Evidence on comprehensibility was gathered through ratings and recall protocols produced by lay readers, both native and non-native speakers of English. Machine translatability was assessed in terms of adequacy and fluency with forty-one Cochrane contributors, all native speakers of Spanish. Authors seemed to welcome the introduction of Acrolinx, and the adoption of this CL checker reduced word length, sentence length, and syntactic complexity. No significant impact on comprehensibility and machine translatability was identified. We observed that reading skills and characteristics other than simplified language (e.g. formatting) might influence comprehension. Machine translation quality was relatively high, with mainly style issues. This thesis presented an environment that could boost volunteer authors’ satisfaction and foster their adoption of simple language. We also discussed strategies to increase the accessibility of online health content among lay readers with different skills and language backgrounds