Health Literacy: A Guide

• SMOG (Simple Measure of Gobbledygook) Calculator:  A basic tool to calculate how many years of education a person needs to understand a piece of writing.  Be sure to check out the How to Use the SMOG Readability Formula on Health Literacy Materials.
• Flesch-Kincaid Readability.  One of the oldest and most accurate measures of readability; used by many government agencies.  Check out the readability of websites using this Readability Test Tool and use this calculator to estimate the reading ease of a text sample. 
• FRY Readability Graph:  A commonly used readability assessment tool.  Includes a tool to calculate the readability of a sample of text
• Gunning FOG readability test:  One of the first readability tools. It is widely used. 
• Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Medicine—Short Form (REALM-SF)  Use this short tool to estimate a patient's reading level.  From AHRQ.

Images

Pixabay: high quality public domain photos, illustrations, vector graphics, and film footage.  Shared under a Creative Commons license.

Unsplash:  website dedicated to sharing copyright-free photography under the Unsplash license.

The Morgue File:  free stock photos for commercial use.

Clip art resources

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention The Centers for Disease Control’s public health image library has a variety of images relating to public health. 

Johns Hopkins University This database of clip-art is from Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs’ Health Communications Network. 

Multimedia and Web Services Anatomy Clip-Art This web site features an electronic gallery of high-quality images from various medical fields. 

Visuals Online (National Cancer Institute) The NCI Visuals Online database contains images of food and people that can be used free of charge. 

Icons

The Noun Project:  over a million royalty-free icons

Iconfinder:  be sure to search by license type to be sure the icon can be used in your project

• SMOG (Simple Measure of Gobbledygook) Calculator:  A basic tool to calculate how many years of education a person needs to understand a piece of writing.  Be sure to check out the How to Use the SMOG Readability Formula on Health Literacy Materials.
• Flesch-Kincaid Readability.  One of the oldest and most accurate measures of readability; used by many government agencies.  Check out the readability of websites using this Readability Test Tool and use this calculator to estimate the reading ease of a text sample. 
• FRY Readability Graph:  A commonly used readability assessment tool.  Includes a tool to calculate the readability of a sample of text
• Gunning FOG readability test:  One of the first readability tools. It is widely used. 
• Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Medicine—Short Form (REALM-SF)  Use this short tool to estimate a patient's reading level.  From AHRQ.

Many word-processing programs offer readability calculation as a tool option.  

Microsoft Word uses Flesch-Kincaid to calculate the readability statistics of a document:

1. Click the File tab, and then click Options.
2. Click Proofing.
3. Under When correcting spelling and grammar in Word, make sure the Check grammar with spelling check box is selected.
4. Select Show readability statistics.

After you enable this feature, open a file that you want to check, and check the spelling. When Outlook or Word finishes checking the spelling and grammar, it displays information about the reading level of the document.