Readability ease of online hearing related information in Hindi

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to assess the readability of hearing-related internet information in the Hindi language. Methods: Five keywords which were commonly used during the Internet search related to hearing problems and hearing impairment were identified by native Hindi speakers. These key terms were entered one by one into Google Bharat, the Hindi version of Google India. The uniform resource locators (URLs) were recorded for the first ten webpage results obtained after entering each search phrase. Each webpage was assessed according to inclusion and exclusion criteria. Finally, 25 webpages were analysed by using a readability computational tool. RH1 and RH2 formulas (Sinha, Sharma, Dasgupta, & Basu, 2012) were used to calculate the Readability Grade Level (RGL). The paragraphs with lowest and highest readability level 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 webpages published in Hindi was not significantly different from the recommended value. A significant difference between the mean RGL for webpages of different origins was identified. The mean RGL calculated by RH1 was significantly higher than the mean RGL calculated by RH2; but 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 high RGL and the paragraph with the low RGL. Conclusion: The RGL calculated by the formulas was within the recommended value, which means 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 in the level of understanding