Services · Design-stage reviews
A Readability Review Fixes the Style Guide, Not the Page
For the content team that wants its style guide to produce pages people can read, skim, and hear, before the next hundred pages get written under it. We score the guide itself, then read pages written under it, then hand back the edits to make at guide level.
What We Keep Finding
A style guide is a template for every page you will ever publish. If the guide blesses "click here" links, headings written as teasers, and paragraphs that run half a screen, then every writer on the team reproduces those barriers on schedule, with the guide's full approval. The barrier is not in the writing. It is in the rules the writing follows.
Where this gets genuinely useful is in separating the requirements from the habits, because a review that mixes those two up starts a panic nobody needed. A heading that describes its topic is a Level AA requirement. Heading levels nested in order is advice rather than a rule. "Click here" inside a sentence that names the destination conforms at AA, and the harder test, the one asking a link to make sense read out on its own, sits at Level AAA. Reading level is Level AAA as well, and its wording accepts a plain-language summary published alongside the hard document rather than a rewrite of it. Abbreviations are AAA. All-caps has no criterion at all.
None of which makes the habits worthless. It makes them habits, and habits are much cheaper to argue about than requirements. It also puts this review squarely in the part of the standard that covers people least. W3C says so in its own introduction, admitting that even the top level of conformance will not reach everyone with cognitive, language, and learning disabilities. That gap is where a person reading your guide beats any tool pointed at your pages.
What We Check
- Score your editorial guidelines for reading level, sentence shape, and paragraph length
- Check your heading rules against rule 2.4.6, the Level AA one asking a heading to describe its topic
- Check your link-text rules, and mark which of them are requirements and which are good habits
- Read sample pages written under the guide, so the guide gets judged on what it produces
- Audit the abbreviation, all-caps, and emphasis habits that garble a page read aloud
- Hand the edits back at guide level, so the fix lands once and every later page inherits it
What You Get
A readability review is one pass rather than three. A reviewer reads your style guide, then reads pages written under it, and hands back a marked-up set of guide edits with the reason attached to each one.
Every item says which of three things it is. A Level AA requirement, a criterion above that bar, or a habit worth keeping anyway. Those three get argued about very differently inside a content team, and a review that blurs them costs you the argument. There is no automated scan and no screen-reader session here, because a style guide is not a page.
The Honest Limit
One honest limit. A style guide cannot be run through a screen reader, so this is an expert review with no blind tester on it. And most of what a readability review finds sits above the Level AA bar, which is the bar you get measured against when somebody asks. So this is the work you buy to make your content good, not the work you buy to answer a compliance question. If somebody has sent you one of those, the audit is the door you want.
What It Costs
Quoted, not packaged. Send us the guide and a handful of pages written under it, and a number comes back by email. It is a fixed number, so a longer list of edits never earns us more, which is the same arrangement the audits run on. The two audit prices on our pricing page buy testing of a built site, and a style guide is not one.
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