A readability assessment of online Parkinson’s disease information

Background: Patients increasingly use the internet to access health information. Inadequate health literacy is common and frequently limits patient comprehension of healthcare literature. We aimed to assess the readability of online consumerorientated Parkinson’s disease (PD) information using two validated measures.

Method: We identified the 100 highest ranked consumer-orientated PD webpages and determined webpage readability using the Flesch-Kincaid and Simple Measure Of Gobbledygook (SMOG) formulae.