Readability Analyzer

The Readability Analyzer is a powerful Apify actor designed to assess the readability of texts. Using various standard scoring formulas, it analyzes provided texts or files and provides a detailed report indicating how easy the content is to read and understand.

Why Use the Readability Analyzer?

This tool offers a fast and reliable solution for improving your content's clarity. It helps you tailor your writing to your target audience and ensures your message is effectively communicated.

• Clarity: Measures text complexity using multiple established readability formulas.
• Flexibility: Supports both plain text and various file formats.
• Large Text Support: Automatically splits texts longer than 10,000 words into chunks for analysis. This ensures that even very large documents can be processed smoothly.
• Easy Integration: Can be easily run on the Apify platform, and the results can be exported in different formats (JSON, CSV, Excel).

Features

• Analyzes readability by text or file upload.
• Supported file formats: .txt, .md, .html, .pdf, .docx.
• Provides a detailed report with various readability scores (Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, Gunning Fog Index, and more).
• Automatically splits large texts into parts and analyzes each one.
• Includes proxy support and a retry mechanism for more reliable results.
• Stores the results in a structured format in the Apify dataset.

Use Cases

• Content Creation: For writers, bloggers, and marketers to ensure their content is clear, engaging, and easy to understand for their target audience.
• Education: For teachers and educators to assess the complexity of educational materials and ensure they are appropriate for the students' reading level.
• Technical Writing: For technical writers to simplify complex information and make manuals or documentation more user-friendly.
• UX/UI Design: To ensure that the text used in interfaces is concise and easy for users to comprehend.

Usage

1. Run this actor in the Apify console.
2. Provide the necessary inputs:
   • textContent: Enter the text you want to analyze for readability (or upload a file below).
   • fileUpload: Upload a file for readability analysis (.txt, .md, .html, .pdf, .docx). If you upload a file, the text field above is ignored.
   • proxyConfiguration: It is recommended to use a proxy for faster and more reliable results.

Example Input

{
  "textContent": "Barack H. Obama is the 44th President of the United States. His story is the American story — values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family, hard work and education as the means of getting ahead, and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others.",
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": []
  }
}

Output

The collected data is saved to the Apify dataset. The output data includes the following fields:

The results object is broken down as follows:

Readability Scores (results.readability)

A collection of various readability metrics:

• fleschReadingEase: Flesch Reading Ease score.
• fleschGradeLevel: Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level.
• gunningFoxIndex: Gunning Fog Index.
• smogIndex: SMOG Index.
• powersSumnerKearl: Powers-Sumner-Kearl Grade.
• forcastGradeLevel: FORCAST Grade Level.
• colemanLiauIndex: Coleman-Liau Index.
• automatedReadabilityIndex: Automated Readability Index (ARI).
• daleChallReadabilityGrade: Dale-Chall Readability Grade.
• spacheReadabilityGrade: Spache Readability Grade.
• linsearWriteGrade: Linsear Write Grade.

Sentence-level Analysis (results.sentences)

An array of objects, where each object provides details about a specific sentence:

• phrase: The original sentence from the text.
• cleanPhrase: A cleaned version of the sentence used for analysis.
• isVeryHard: A boolean indicating if the sentence is considered very difficult to read.
• isHard: A boolean indicating if the sentence is considered difficult to read.
• wordsOver13Chars: A list of words in the sentence with more than 13 characters.
• wordsOver4Syllables: A list of words in the sentence with more than 4 syllables.
• adverbs: A list of adverbs found in the sentence.

Text Statistics (results.textStats)

An object containing overall statistics for the analyzed text:

• letterCount: Total number of letters.
• sentenceCount: Total number of sentences.
• uniqueWordCount: Number of unique words.
• syllableCount: Total number of syllables.
• averageSyllablesPerWord: Average syllables per word.
• wordsWithThreeSyllables: Number of words with three or more syllables.
• percentWordsWithThreeSyllables: The percentage of words with three or more syllables.
• longestSentence: The longest sentence in the text.
• paragraphCount: Total number of paragraphs.
• averageSpeakingTime: Estimated time to speak the text.
• averageReadingTime: Estimated time to read the text.
• averageWritingTime: Estimated time to write the text.

Example Output

{
    "phrases": [
        "Barack H.",
        "Obama is the 44th President of the United States.",
        "His story is the American story — values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family, hard work and education as the means of getting ahead, and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others."
    ],
    "results": {
        "readability": {
            "fleschReadingEase": 61.7,
            "fleschGradeLevel": 9.1,
            "gunningFoxIndex": 10.9,
            "smogIndex": 12,
            "powersSumnerKearl": 2.9,
            "forcastGradeLevel": 16.4,
            "colemanLiauIndex": 10.1,
            "automatedReadabilityIndex": 8.3,
            "daleChallReadabilityGrade": 4.7,
            "spacheReadabilityGrade": 4.4,
            "linsearWriteGrade": 11.4
        },
        "sentences": [
            {
                "phrase": "Barack H.",
                "cleanPhrase": "Barack H ",
                "isVeryHard": false,
                "isHard": false,
                "wordsOver13Chars": [],
                "wordsOver4Syllables": [],
                "adverbs": []
            },
            {
                "phrase": "Obama is the 44th President of the United States.",
                "cleanPhrase": "Obama is the 44th President of the United States ",
                "isVeryHard": false,
                "isHard": false,
                "wordsOver13Chars": [],
                "wordsOver4Syllables": [],
                "adverbs": []
            },
            {
                "phrase": "His story is the American story — values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family, hard work and education as the means of getting ahead, and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others.",
                "cleanPhrase": "His story is the American story   values from the heartland  a middle class upbringing in a strong family  hard work and education as the means of getting ahead  and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others ",
                "isVeryHard": true,
                "isHard": false,
                "wordsOver13Chars": [],
                "wordsOver4Syllables": [],
                "adverbs": [
                    "hard"
                ]
            }
        ],
        "textStats": {
            "letterCount": 238,
            "sentenceCount": 3,
            "uniqueWordCount": 42,
            "syllableCount": 80,
            "totalSyllables": 81,
            "averageSyllablesPerWord": 1.5,
            "wordsWithThreeSyllables": 7,
            "percentWordsWithThreeSyllables": 12.96,
            "longestSentence": "his story is the American story values from the heartland a middle class upbringing in a strong family hard work and education as the means of getting ahead and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others. ",
            "paragraphCount": 1,
            "averageSpeakingTime": 0.4,
            "averageReadingTime": 0.2,
            "averageWritingTime": 1.4
        }
    }
}

This example output shows the detailed statistical data resulting from the analysis of the submitted text. The output is a list containing a similar object for each piece of text analyzed.

Notes

• The collected data is stored in Apify's default data store.