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Readability checker

Paste your text and see six readability formulas update live, plus a plain-language read on how easy it is to follow. Nothing is uploaded — it runs in your browser. Free, instant, no sign-up.

Scores update as you type. Nothing you paste here is sent anywhere — the whole calculation runs in your browser.

At a glance

Words
57
Sentences
5
Syllables
78

Flesch Reading Ease 79.5 — fairly easy (about 7th grade reading level).

Readability scores for the text above, one row per formula
FormulaScore
Flesch Reading Ease0–100 scale, higher = easier — The most widely used score. Higher numbers mean plainer, easier text.79.50
Flesch–Kincaid Grade LevelUS school grade — The US school grade a reader would need to follow this on a first read.5.0
Gunning Fog Indexyears of education — Years of formal education needed to understand the text easily.8.8
SMOG IndexUS school grade — Another grade-level estimate, weighted more heavily toward long words.9.4
Coleman–Liau IndexUS school grade — A grade-level estimate based on letters and sentences, not syllables.8.8
Automated Readability IndexUS school grade — A grade-level estimate based on characters per word and words per sentence.6.1

In plain words

Flesch Reading Ease band

fairly easy

Fairly easy to read.

Roughly a 7th grade reading level in the US school system.

These formulas were built for English. They estimate reading level from sentence and word length — they don’t judge tone, accuracy or whether the content is actually useful.

What the scores mean

All six formulas estimate how hard a piece of English text is to read, from sentence length and word length (mostly syllable count). They don’t know what the words mean — a short, technically accurate sentence can still score as “easy” while being wrong, and a long, correct one can score as “difficult”. Use the scores as a signal about sentence and word length, not a verdict on quality.

  • Flesch Reading Ease. A 0–100 scale where higher means easier to read; the most widely cited of the six, from Rudolf Flesch’s original 1948 formula.
  • Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman–Liau, and the Automated Readability Index (ARI). Five different ways of estimating the US school grade (or years of education) a reader needs to follow the text on a first read. They rarely agree exactly — each weighs sentence length, word length or syllables slightly differently — which is why we show all five side by side rather than picking one.

Where this sits in the law

Reading level is WCAG 2.2 Success Criterion 3.1.5 — Level AAA. It is good practice, not the legal minimum. The harmonised standard EN 301 549 and the national laws transposing the European Accessibility Act generally require Level AA — the tier that our contrast checker covers. Plain, simple writing is one of the few AAA criteria worth aiming for anyway (clearer text helps every reader, not just people covered by a specific law), but skip this page if you’re checking a strict legal AA obligation — it doesn’t apply there. Understanding 3.1.5.

The formulas above are calibrated for English only — sentence and syllable patterns differ enough between languages that the same coefficients don’t transfer. This is orientation, not legal advice, and we show no fine amounts.

Readable text is one piece. Your whole site is more.

Wording is one of dozens of things that shape whether a page actually works for people. Point our free scanner at a real URL and it checks the whole page against WCAG 2.2 — the Level AA criteria that laws actually require — and tells you what to fix first, with the legal context for the site’s jurisdiction.

Scan a full page — freeOr find a specialist to fix it →

Want to check colour contrast too? Try the contrast checker, or see what our scanner covers, criterion by criterion.

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