When The Experts Write: A Readability Analysis Of Public Universities’ Websites In Ghana

Abstract

Websites of institutions of higher learning provide valuable resources to students, professors, parents, and the general public. Since the websites have a wide range of audience, with different educational backgrounds, the contents on the websites must be readable in order to make them useful to the general public. This paper evaluated the readability of websites of seven public universities. Convenience sampling was employed to select 30 articles from each website (n =210), and Flesch reading ease and grade level were employed to compute readability scores. The results revealed that contents on all the seven websites were very difficult to read, requiring 14 years of education to be able to comprehend, on the average. Only two of the websites (those of University of Development Studies, Tamale and University of Education, Winneba) differed statistically in their readability. It was recommended that webmasters re-evaluate the contents on their websites to make them more readable. Keywords  Readability, Websites, FRE, University, Readability Formulas.