Reading Abilities of Elderly Persons in Relation to the Difficulty of Essential Documents

Abstract

The study addresses the question of how elderly persons cope with the reading demands of federal, state, and local service agencies. Ninety elderly persons were tested for their reading ability, and 126 documents from seven service agencies were analyzed for their readability. When the reading ability of the tested persons was matched against document difficulty, two thirds of the sample had reading abilities lower than 8th grade, whereas 98% of the documents had readability levels at or above 9th grade.