Readability Ease of Online Hearing‑Related Information in Hindi

Abstract

Introduction: The purpose of this study was to assess the readability of hearing-related Internet information in Hindi language. Methods: Native Hindi speakers identified five Hindi keywords relating to hearing problems that were used to search for hearing-related web pages. These key terms were entered one by one into Google Bharat, the Hindi version of Google India. The uniform resource locators were recorded for the first ten web pages resulting from that search. Each web page was assessed according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The reading grade level (RGL) for the resulting 25 web pages were analyzed using Readability Hindi 1 (RH1) and Readability Hindi 2 (RH2) formulas. The paragraphs with lowest and highest RGL were identified and used for a cloze test. Ten participants were recruited after applying inclusion and exclusion criteria. They were instructed to complete the cloze test. Results: The mean RGL of hearing-related web pages published in Hindi was not significantly different from the recommended value. The mean RGL calculated by RH1 was significantly higher than the mean RGL calculated by RH2; however, there was a significant and positive correlation between the RGL values calculated by RH1 and RH2. No significant differences in cloze scores were found between the paragraph with the highest RGL and the paragraph with the lowest RGL. Conclusions: The RGL calculated by the formulas was within the recommended value, which indicates the hearing-related material available on the Internet in Hindi is easy to read. However, the results of readability ease calculated by the cloze test suggested that the paragraphs with maximum RGL and minimum RGL were not significantly different from each other.