BACKGROUND: High-quality information is essential if clients who request an abortion are to reach informed decisions and feel prepared for the procedure, but little is known concerning the readability of web-based sources containing such material. The aim was to investigate the readability of web-based information about induced abortion.

METHODS: The search engine Google was used to identify web pages about induced abortion, written in the English language. A total of 240 hits were screened and 236 web pages fulfilled the inclusion criteria. After correcting for duplicate hits, 185 web pages were included. The readability of the text-based content of each web page was determined with Flesch Kincaid Grade Level, Gunning Fog Index, Coleman-Liau Index, Simple Measure of Gobbledygook, and Flesch Reading Ease. Data were analyzed with descriptive statistics, Pearson's correlation coefficient and Kruskal-Wallis with Dunn's test as post hoc analysis.

RESULTS: Across all grade level measures, a small minority of the web pages had a readability corresponding to elementary school (n < 3, 1%), while the majority had readability corresponding to senior high school or above (n > 153, 65%). The means of the grade level measures ranged between 10.5 and 13.1, and the mean Flesch Reading Ease score was 45.3 (SD 13.6). Only weak correlations (rho < 0.2) were found between the readability measures and search rank in the hit lists. Consistently, web pages affiliated with health care had the least difficult readability and those affiliated with scientific sources had the most difficult readability.

CONCLUSIONS: Overall, web-based information about induced abortions has difficult readability. Incentives are needed to improve the readability of these texts and ensure that clients encounter understandable information so that they may reach informed decisions and feel adequately prepared when requesting an abortion.