The Health Literacy Advisor™

The Health Literacy Advisor (HLA) is a powerful software tool to help you assess and improve the readability of your documents using plain language principles. The HLA was designed to save you time:

Powerful, but as easy as 1-2-3!

Quickly Calculate Readability

Grade your document's readability in seconds with your choice of indices.

After calculating your readability score you can stamp your document with a record of its reading grade level. You can stamp the document before you start, after your first edit, and whenever you want to track your progress. And if you have met your target reading grade level (configurable, of course) the HLA will include an exclusive ReadEasy™ stamp that can be seen at a glance. Stamping your document – showing the progress – is particularly useful when there are two or more editors reviewing a document.

The HLA "cleans" your document by ignoring bullet items, headings, names, and emails when calculating readability.

The HLA includes these readability indices:

• Fry-Based Electronic Readability Formula
• Precise SMOG
• Gunning-Fog
• Automated Readability Index (ARI)
• Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level
• Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease
• New Dale-Chall Formula
• FORCAST Readability Formula
• Coleman-Liau Index

Interactively Search and Replace

Use the HLA's Search and Replace feature to change jargon and hard-to-understand words and phrases into simple, plain language. The HLA has a built-in lexicon with plain-language alternatives and descriptions for more than 12,000 hard-to-understand words, phrases, and medical jargon.

You can scan the entire document or just a portion – this comes in handy for those long documents.

The HLA works great with non-health documents, too, since 8,000 of the lexicon's terms are not specifically health-related.

Visually Scan and Highlight

To help you focus on problem areas, the HLA can highlight:

• Known complicated words by health, non-health, or both
• All other words with three or more syllables
• Long sentences

But Wait, There's More!

We know our stuff! The HLA was developed by seasoned health literacy, plain language, and software professionals. It comes packed with unique features and valuable extras:

• A free PDF Style Guide that offers advice on writing clearly, as well as and tips and techniques for design and layout
• The ReadEasy™ Document Assessment (REDA™) tool that combines the HLA readability data with an electronic self-assessment to help you evaluate how well your document meets readability, content, design, and cultural appropriateness standards
• We are always improving the HLA, and your license entitles you to free updates as we release them

System Requirements

• The HLA is an add-in to Microsoft Word XP/2002, 2003, 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, and Office 365 desktop app, 32- or 64-bit, running on a Windows computer
• All versions of Windows through Windows 10 are supported
• Once installed, the HLA uses a global template that loads when Word starts, so it is always ready and waiting on Word's Toolbar/Ribbon