The ZeMKI Working Paper entitled “Auditing the Text Understandability of German Public Administration Websites” analyses the comprehensibility of texts on German public administration websites. Research on text simplification often assumes that the existing text is too complex, but so far there is no empirical basis for this claim. This paper provides a starting point to substantiate the claim that complex texts are ubiquitous.
With a focus on German public administration, the study presents the results of a data mining audit study that analysed over 49,900 websites of 26 large administrative districts in Germany. The study shows that difficult texts are a universal problem. The vast majority of texts on the official websites of German districts are either difficult or very difficult to understand. Despite minor differences between the counties, the texts were difficult to understand in all counties. Furthermore, no strong correlation was found between the number of inhabitants, the area of a county or the population density.
The paper also provides recommendations on how this study can be continued in the future.
Further information and the full paper can be found here.