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Accessibility

Reading age

Plain English, measured

We aim for plain English everywhere, with a reading age target for each audience. We score our wording with one fixed formula, Flesch-Kincaid, turned into a UK reading age. No AI is involved in the scoring.

  • The app's messages must have a reading age of 11 or under, the NHS target. A test fails any change that breaks this, unless an admin overrides it. Messages under 15 words are too short to score.
  • Consent and privacy messages have a limit of 14. The NHS accepts 11 to 14 where medical wording is hard to make simpler.
  • Sixteen consent and privacy messages read above 14, up to 25. Fourteen are clauses copied word for word from the signed consent form. Each has a limit of its own, so none can get harder.
  • The report's fixed wording aims for 11 too. We measure it, but nothing stops it getting harder, and today it reads at about 16.
  • The AI is told to write the chat and the report for a reading age of 12, and the report's opening summary for 9. We measure and store the reading age of each report it writes. If the measuring fails, the report still goes out, with no score. We check the chat's replies in test runs, not live.
  • Articles in our resources section are for parents looking into a topic. Each article's limit is 19, and a test fails any change that breaks it.
  • The rest of the website aims for 11. Pages for professionals, our programme pages, our about page and our legal pages aim for 14. A script measures this when we run it by hand. It cannot stop a change.

Reading age in the app, area by area

This table shows the reading age of each part of the app, measured from the 82 screens our tests show. Short labels and buttons are too short to score, so we leave them out. It is a report only: nothing fails when a number goes up. A separate nightly run opens each app screen our map of the service can reach, about 60 of them, in a real browser and scores the wording on it. It skips a screen with fewer than 15 words, and it is a report only too. This table goes with 3.1.5 Reading Level on the Beyond AA page.

For comparison, the NHS aims for a reading age of 9 to 11 in what it writes for the public.

Reading age of each area of the Assembly app, measured from its rendered screens
Area Screens Reading age Hardest screen
Signing in 13 12 claim, a pilot invitation, the consent form, age 14
Home and getting started 4 1 too short to score 8 welcome, trial parent after booking, age 11
The profiler questions 17 3 too short to score 10 profiler/overview, priority-areas (dimensions-overview), age 20
The profile and report 8 10 profile/dimensions, one dimension, age 15
Chat 2 9 chat, a titled thread, age 9
Sharing and consent 4 13 sharing, the pilot consent screen, age 14
Settings and your data 7 7 reminders/stop, the question, age 9
Help and learning 9 11 programmes, the index, age 16
School and clinic staff 18 4 too short to score 9 invite a parent to complete a profile, the check page, age 13