Services Australia has most readable govt website

Services Australia has the most readable government website in the nation, according to a new scorecard released by Ethos CRS.

The 2021 readability scorecard for Australian government agencies ranked the Services Australia website as having a readability score of 119.3 — higher than the benchmark of 100 and more than double the score of the next highest agency, the ATO (51.2).

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission was ranked as having the most readable documents, with a readability score of 34.5. Meanwhile, Defence Housing Australia had the best grade level score — a measure of how well text is tailored to people with a lower education level — of 13.0, and the best score for short sentences, with just 21.9% long sentences.

Finally, the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources had the highest use of the active voice at 85.1% of all sentences.

But the report also identified significant room for improvement, with all 136 documents in the survey falling below benchmarks for good readability to varying degrees.

Services Australia website Product Manager Julie Watkins-Lyall said Services Australia is careful to take a human-centric approach to designing webpages.

“In 2019–20, people with a range of diverse backgrounds and reading abilities viewed pages on our website 324 million times. We have to make sure they can find and understand the information they need quickly, so they can get on with their lives,” she said.

“Content designers, communication specialists and subject matter experts develop content, with our delivery team doing a final check before it’s published.”

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/vege