readable

In science

In the sciences, readability is a measure of an instrument's ability to display incremental changes in its output value. For example, a balance with a readability of 1 mg will not display any difference between objects with masses from 0.6 mg to 1.4 mg, because possible display values are 0 mg, 1 mg, 2 mg etc. Likewise, a balance with a readability of 0.1 mg will not display any difference between objects with masses from 0.06 mg to 0.14 mg.

In writing

Generally, readability is a measure of the accessibility of a piece of writing and/or associated page layout, indicating how effectively it will reach a given reading audience.

Readability is a judgment of how easy a text is to understand for a given established and characterised population.

The understandability of a text is an interaction between the reader whose possible prior knowledge of aspects of the content and the text features would influence the ease with which they access the text, as well as the fixed aspects of the text itself. Presentation factors unrelated to the language of the text also affect readability, for example choice of typeface, text size, layout and colors.

Readability may be assessed by conducting a readability survey, or by application of readability tests which have been established through analysis of readability survey results. Often writers, editors and publishers make an intuitive assessment of readability based on experience, insight into their target audience, and knowledge of a number of rules of thumb, which are often derived from assessment of a number of readability survey results, such as that English textbooks are most readable when laid out with 20% whitespace on the page.

Re-readability - the propensity to again read something previously read after some time - appears to be a criterion dependent upon the reader. Yet, some authors, such as Robert A. Heinlein, appear to be more gifted to produce re-readable works than others as is apparent from the rate of re-printing.

In programming

In computer programming, readability refers to the ease with which a human reader can comprehend the purpose, flow, and operation of a machine-readable section of source code.

Readability is important because source code must inevitably be maintained by human beings, and if the code is not readable (or "obfuscated"), then bugs, inefficiencies, and duplicated code are likely to be introduced.

Many factors, having little or nothing to do with the ability of the computer to efficiently compile and execute the code, are therefore part of good programming style, because they affect readability. Some of these factors include:

• Different indentation styles (whitespace)
• Comments
• Decomposition
• Naming conventions for objects (such as variables, classes, procedures, etc)

In typography

Correct use of type size, line spacing, column width, text-color-background contrast and white space make text easy to read. See Typography#Readability and legibility for more details.

See also

• Readability test
• Gunning-Fog Index
• Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
• SMOG Index
• Coleman-Liau Index
• Lisenability

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