NZ Govt Plain Language Loserboard

The New Zealand Government automatically analyses the readability of all its public-facing websites using the Centralised Web Accessibility Checker (CWAC) monitoring programme. I have created the following loserboard from this data. Data will be updated quarterly.

This data was collected on: Loading…

Readability algorithms used:

• SMOG Grade Level: Simple Measure of Gobbledygook — estimates the US school grade level needed to understand the text (used for rankings). This targets 100% comprehension at the given grade level — best for mission-critical tasks, like healthcare, welfare, and emergency services.
• Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: Another US school grade level estimate. This targets 75% comprehension at the given grade level.

Tips:

• Share filtered results — search for something, then copy the URL from your address bar and shame websites into writing more plainly

Limitations:

• Non-English sites — Some sites may have inaccurate readings due to non-English text.
• Inaccuracy — the SMOG and Flesch-Kincaid algorithms are not guaranteed to be perfectly accurate — they must be interpreted in context of the actual text by a human. They are, however, useful high-level metrics.
• Text extraction quirks — CWAC uses a special technique to extract contiguous blocks of text out of web pages for testing. This technique is fairly good, however, sometimes issues may occur in the text extraction process.

Licence of source data

Note: this applies to the raw source data only, not the presentation of the data on this page.

• Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Source: Centralised Web Accessibility Checker (CWAC) monitoring programme
• Author: Department of Internal Affairs | NZ Government Web Standards Team
• Modifications: This page is generated through data analysis, and presentation of the raw source data.

Licence of this page

This website’s general licence terms apply.