In June 2025, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) will come into force. So you need to ask, how accessible is your writing?

Lots of organisations use readability checkers to score how easy their writing is to read. And those tools are great (we have one on our website). But sometimes they can:

  • lull you into a false sense of security
  • score something as 'very readable', when in fact, the content is impenetrable.

If your business has to adhere to the EAA, and you’re using readability checkers to assess your writing, this is a word of caution.

First, what’s a readability checker?

There are lots of them. The most well-known is Flesch Reading Ease. It gives writing a score out of 100.

By Flesch standards, the lower the score, the more difficult a piece of writing is to read. A score of 70-80 would indicate that the writing is fairly easy for the average adult to read. The formula looks at sentence length and word complexity, based on the number of syllables.

This blog so far scores 70 (depending on which readability checker you use).

So, what’s the problem?

Exactly that. If we're all getting different scores, which one is right? Is yours misleading you to think your writing is accessible when it's not?

Let’s take this extract from HMRC.gov, because it’s a perfect example of producing a misleading readability score:

Multiple birth

You can get extra Universal Credit and Child Tax Credit for your third and subsequent children if they're born as part of a multiple birth, apart from one child in that birth. This means the exception applies to the additional children in that birth.

Where the first child of the multiple birth is either the first or second child in the household, we'll pay a child amount for all the children born as part of the multiple birth. This means you can get an additional amount for that child (the first child) as well as the other child or children of the multiple birth.

That passage scores 70 on Flesch Reading Ease. And that’s because the sentences aren’t overly long and most of the words are short. But it’s actually really difficult to understand. It’s inaccessible.

Readability checkers are great tools, but…

We can’t be ruled by them or uncritically trust the scores. Word length and sentence length alone can’t indicate how accessible writing is (especially when different checkers score words and sentences differently).

It’s why when we audit writing, we don’t rely solely on automated checkers. We pair professional writers with our own Accessibility Index scorecard.

Scrutinise your writing for accessibility over readability

We’ve developed a broader set of measures than your average readability checker. Those give us sensitive ‘reads’ of documents, and insightful scores. So when we audit writing, it lets us rank documents in order of worst to best, and we know where to focus our rewriting efforts.

We can even cut the data to pinpoint whether there’s a particular team, topic, audience or channel that’s scoring poorly. And our writers can look into it and improve those scores.

Check out what happens when we rewrote that HMRC example:

Multiple birth – twins, triplets or more than three children at a time

We'll pay extra credit for every child in a multiple birth, unless the household already has two or more children.

It only jumps up 5 points on Flesch Reading Ease but is significantly more accessible.

Accessibility benefits everyone, not just those who need it

Curb cuts, closed captions, elevators, automatic doors – all of these things were built for people with accessibility needs. All of these things have benefited everyone.

The same is true of accessible language. Writing that is clear, concise and uncomplicated benefits everyone – not just people with learning difficulties or dyslexia. Not just people reading in a second language. Not just the 54% of Americans with a reading age of below 11-12 years old. Or the 1 in 6 adults in the UK with the literacy skills of a 9-11 year old. Everyone.

And finally, money talks (accessible language is good for business)

For one high street bank, our rewrite increased the response rate for a customer letter by 800%.

For another, we saved them £1.4m by rewriting a stack of customer comms, that reduced call volumes, increased response rates and slashed postage costs.

If you’re in the midst of updating content to comply with EAA, or are thinking about accessibility and want to get the right results with your words, talk to us.