Visualizing multiple text readability indexes

Many readability tests have been developed to assess the reading difficulty of a text document. However, a typical readability index is a single average number for the entire document, which does not indicate the readability at the paragraph level. In addition, multiple readability indexes often do not correlate well at the paragraph level, leading to variations of readability measurements for paragraphs. In this paper, we propose two visualization methods to present readability indexes at the paragraph level. We use a colored ring to indicate the overall readability index for a paragraph and a Chernoff face to encode multiple readability indexes. Our methods can help readers and writers to quickly identify complex paragraphs for revisions. They are particularly helpful for documents with multiple authors.