Free Readability Checker for Policies & Training Documents | Fluent Frame

How is the comprehension figure calculated?

Readability formulas tell you how many years of formal education a text assumes. They don't tell you how many people understood it. To get from one to the other we model your audience's own reading level as a distribution, then take the share of that audience sitting at or above the level your document demands. It's reported as a range because that's the precision the method actually supports.

Why a range instead of one number?

Because one number would be false precision. The inputs are a readability score and an assumption about your workforce, and neither is exact to a decimal place. A range you can defend in a budget meeting is worth more than a number that falls apart the first time someone asks where it came from.

Which formulas are used?

For English: Flesch-Kincaid grade level as the headline (Kincaid, Fishburne, Rogers & Chissom, 1975), plus Flesch Reading Ease and Gunning Fog. For Bulgarian: LIX (Björnsson, 1968), which is language-agnostic by design and works on Slavic languages. We do not run Flesch-Kincaid on Bulgarian - it's calibrated on English syllable counts and the result would be meaningless.

Why is there no passive voice count for Bulgarian?

Because we can't measure it honestly yet. English passives are a reliable auxiliary-plus-participle pattern. Bulgarian passives need real morphological analysis, and a pattern match over Bulgarian returns noise. We'd rather show you one fewer number than a wrong one.

How does this square with your ROI calculator?

They use the same benchmark. Published figures put comprehension of written internal material around 31% and of the equivalent video around 79% - about 48 percentage points. This model is calibrated so a typical corporate policy read by a mixed workforce lands on that same 31%, and so plain-language material lands near 80%. Run the audit and the calculator back to back and the numbers will agree.

Questions people ask

Is this actually free?

Yes. The full result is on screen, free, with nothing blurred or held back. We ask for an email address only if you want the file to download or forward - and no newsletter unless you tick the box.

Do I need an account?

No. There's no sign-up, no credit card and no trial to start. Open the page, put something in, get the result.

What happens to my document?

We delete uploads after 30 days, and we don't train anything on your documents. If you'd rather we kept nothing at all, paste the text instead of uploading the file - pasted text is processed and discarded, never stored.

How is the comprehension score calculated?

Readability formulas tell you how many years of education a text assumes; we model your audience's reading level against that and report the overlap as a range. Every assumption, including the published sources, is written out in the 'how we work this out' panel under the result. Nothing is hidden, because you'll want to defend this number to someone.

Does it work on Bulgarian documents?

Yes, and it uses a different metric to do it. Flesch-Kincaid is calibrated on English and means very little on Bulgarian, so Bulgarian text is scored with LIX, which is language-agnostic by design. We also don't report a passive-voice count for Bulgarian, because we can't measure it accurately yet and a wrong number is worse than a missing one.

What file types can I upload?

PDF, DOCX and TXT, or just paste the text. If a PDF is a scan with no text layer, we'll tell you - we don't run OCR, so paste the text instead.