Evaluation of the readability of online texts related with autism spectrum disorder

Aim: There has been a rapid incline in the number of patients diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), recently. The present study aims to analyze the content and readability of online Turkish texts, on Turkish websites related to autism spectrum disorder. Methods: In order to collect the necessary data of the present study, Google (http://www.google.com.tr), a commonly used internet search engine in our country, was used. Hence 300 websites from the first ten generated pages after writing the keywords autism, atypical autism, and autism spectrum disorder on the search engine were analyzed. Out of these 300 sites, sites containing only advertisement, videos, images and sites containing less than ten sentences, chat and forum sites, commercial sales sites and news sites that do not contain information about ASD were excluded. The mean number of syllables, the average number of words with four syllables and above, the average number of words and readability values were calculated according to Ateşman and Bezirci-Yılmaz. Results: The mean number of words in the analyzed texts was 14.42 ± 0.48, of words with four syllables and above was 4.52 ± 0.17, of syllables was 2.92 ± 0.01 and the readability value of the texts analyzed is according to Bezirci-Yılmaz was 14.68 ± 0, 52 and according to Ateşman it was 43.72 ± 1.45. The mean number of words among the study groups is (p = 0.538), the mean number of words with four and more syllables is (p = 0.548) and the mean number of syllables is (p = 0.652), Bezirci-Yılmaz readability value is (p = 0.772), Ateşman readability value is (p = 0.626) displaying no statistically significant difference. Conclusion: As a result of this study, it was found that the data presented on the internet about ASD was far beyond the health literacy level of our people.