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A goal of integrated reporting (IR) under the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC)’s leadership is to provide clearly written, comprehensible and accessible information. In light of this objective, the purpose of this paper is to explore the readability and accessibility of integrated reports, an issue magnified by the IIRC’s continual commitment to clear and readable report language, and its intention for IR to become the corporate reporting norm.

In a whole text software facilitated analysis, the study utilises readability measures and supplementary measures of reader accessibility in a multi-year analysis of a large sample of global integrated reports sourced from the IIRC examples database.

The findings highlight the low readability of analysed integrated reports and indicate that readability is not improving. The supplementary measures suggest sub-optimal use of visual communication forms and overuse of structural presentation techniques which may contribute to reader accessibility of the analysed reports.

The study extends readability analysis to an emerging corporate reporting phenomenon and its findings contribute to the growing IR literature. The study applies supplementary measures of reader accessibility which advance the methods available to assess the communication efficacy of integrated and other corporate reports.

The analysis of the readability and accessibility of integrated reports in the study indicates that the IIRC’s goal of clear, comprehensible and accessible reporting is not reflected by reporters’ practices. This has implications for the IIRC, reporting organisations, report readers and regulators.

The study represents the first large-scale analysis of the readability and accessibility of global integrated reports.

In this study, various acts including regulations of public financial management, fiscal responsibility, and state budget in the selected six countries were subjected to different readability tests, and an international comparison was made. The fiscal responsibility act of six countries – Turkey, the UK, India, Australia, Canada, and Pakistan – were included in the study and analyzed. Each country was analyzed under its official language. Since English is an official language of all of the countries except for Turkey, the authors have evaluated the fiscal responsibility acts of these countries using the following readability tests: Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning-Fog, and Dale-Chall. Additionally, Public Financial Management and Control Law No. 5018 approved in Turkey was analyzed by the Ateşman Readability Test which was uniquely designed for Turkish grammar rules. The acts discussed in the study were analyzed not only as a whole but also in parts and subsections. According to the results of the study, the levels of readability of the existing laws in most of the selected countries are very difficult to understand for a university graduate. However, when the readability level of the British Budget Responsibility and National Audit Act tested as parts and subsections and a whole, it was rated at a level a university student could understand. This study analyses the readability and intelligibility of acts related to fiscal responsibility and the state budget in six selected countries, adopting Anglo-Saxon public administration model and making an inter-country evaluation. Since it is important that citizens have enough information about legislation for a citizen-oriented understanding, a legislation system that is understood by the larger part of the society is essential.

This study aims to explore the intelligibility of communication with stakeholders as a result of accrual accounting adoption. It focuses on changes in the use of visual forms and the readability of text that occurred immediately after the adoption of accrual accounting in performance reports of Italian public universities.

The authors collect the stakeholder section of performance reports published before and after accrual accounting adoption. Then, the authors use manual and computer-assisted textual analysis. Finally, the authors explore the data using principal component analysis and qualitative comparative analysis.

This study demonstrates that switching from cash to accrual accounting provokes immediate changes in communication patterns. It confirms the significant reduction of readability and increase in visual forms after accruals accounting adoption. The results indicate that smaller universities especially put effort into increasing intelligibility while implementing a more complex accounting system. This study also finds a relation between the change in readability and the change in visual forms that are complementary, with the exception of several very large universities.

The findings underline the possibility of neutralising the adverse effects of accounting reform associated with its complexity and difficulties in understanding by the use of visual forms and attention to the document’s readability.

This paper adds a new dimension to the study of public sector accounting from the external stakeholder perspective. It provides further insight into the link between accrual accounting adoption and readability, together with the use of visual forms by universities.

This paper aims to examine and critique the accounting literature's dominant readability formula, the Flesch formula. Furthermore, the paper sets out to propose refinement and augmentation to the formula with a view to expanding its applicability and relevance to researchers' attempts at better understanding and critiquing the effectiveness of accounting communications. This aim extends to setting a more robust foundation for informing policymakers' and practitioners' interest in implementing more effective communications with their target stakeholders.

The paper offers an historically informed methodological critique of the current articulation and application of the Flesch formula, both generally and in accounting research. This critique forms the basis for developing proposed revisions and supplementary measures to augment Flesch's coverage. These are presented with sample empirics.

Illustrative examples suggest that it is feasible and desirable to apply a revised formula that reduces Flesch's misplaced emphasis on word length by respecifying its sentence length variable, a probable cause of low readability. A reader attribute score further enhances the formula by integrating the considerable impact of readers' attributes on readability and accounting communication effectiveness. Supplementary measures, comprising non‐narrative communications dimensions, are introduced as a foundation for further research.

The paper provides not only critique but also refinement and augmentation of the much used Flesch readability formula for accounting communications research. It offers a first stage approach to encompassing potentially important communication elements such as readers' attributes, tables, graphs and headings, to date critiqued as potentially important but left unattended by accounting researchers. This offers the prospect of extending Flesch's application to contemporary accounting communications issues and questions.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comment on “The struggle to fabricate accounting narrative obfuscation: An actor-network-theoretic analysis of a failing project” by Brian Rutherford.

The paper discusses issues highlighted by Rutherford regarding the unresolved limitations of the Flesch formulaic approach to readability analysis and the narrow focus of readability research in accounting.

Commencing with an overview of an important shift in the use of the Flesch formula in accounting readability research in 2004, the paper outlines the emergence of supplementary measures and proxies of readability and reader accessibility of accounting prose. When used in combination with Flesch, the two measures augment readability analysis, ameliorate the formula’s limitations and broaden readability research scope and focus.

The paper gives impetus to the development of additional supplementary measures and proxies of readability and reader access which are necessary to further expand the horizons of accounting readability research and meet ongoing changes to the contemporary accounting communications landscape.

This study aimed at investigating the readability of sustainability reports in Indonesia. The Indonesian government, through the Financial Services Authority of Indonesia (Otoritas Jasa Keuangan [OJK]), has issued regulation POJK 51/2017 concerning the implementation of sustainable finance, which requires public companies to prepare sustainability reports—either stand-alone reports or parts of annual reports. Until 2017, only 30% of the top public companies in terms of market capitalisation issued the required report. Companies' decisions to provide the report stem from the greater visibility and access to resources that flow from additional narratives. However, the usefulness of such a report can be questioned.

We used several linguistic techniques (Flesch Reading Ease [FRE], Flesch–Kincaid, and Gunning Fog measures) to evaluate the readability of sustainability reports. The analysis was performed using a software application called “Readability Studio 2015.”

We found the reports to have a low level of readability. This means that the information provided in the disclosures are very difficult to decipher and understand by the targeted users. Considering the similar levels of report readability in companies across industries, we observe a pattern of isomorphism in the way companies have implemented the same format and language construct in disclosing their sustainability information. They might apply the myth that complex language attracts investors or impresses others.

The techniques to measure readability that we use might not capture the whole dimensions of readability and understandability, especially in the non-English language.

The results from this study can be used as evaluation tools for companies and regulators in preparing more intelligible and readable sustainability reports, as mandated by POJK 51/2017.

Sustainability reports act as a medium of accountability for a company's sustainable production and operations. Their usefulness for investors and other users often depends on the readability of the information.

The readability of sustainability reports in the context of Indonesia as an emerging market has not been comprehensively investigated in previous research. This study is among the first of its kind to support the quality enhancement of the reports.

Risk information provides information to enable stakeholders to make informed decisions about a company. Corporate communications should be readable and unbiased so as not to hamper disclosure usefulness. This study assesses whether risk disclosures in the integrated reports are readable and unbiased.

The readability and narrative tone of South African listed companies' risk and risk management disclosures as disclosed in their integrated reports are analysed using automated software for the Top 40 JSE listed companies from 2015 to 2019.

The results show that risk and risk management disclosures are unreadable and lack any improvement in readability during the period. Additionally, these disclosures are biased toward narrative tones signalling communality and certainty.

The study adds to the literature on the readability of corporate reports, by focussing on the readability and narrative tone of risk and risk management disclosures during a period of increased scrutiny over the content of such disclosures. Also, by analysing risk disclosure and risk management disclosure separately, and by performing trend analysis to determine whether requirement changes related to content (specifically King IV) affect readability and narrative tones.

The purpose of this study was to explore the viability of transinformation analysis as a multimodal readability metric. A novel approach was called for, considering that existing and established readability metrics are strictly used to measure linguistic complexity. Yet, the corpus of multimodal literature continues to grow, along with the need to understand how non-linguistic modalities contribute to the complexity of the reading experience.

In this exploratory study, think aloud screen recordings of eighth-grade readers of the born-digital novel Inanimate Alice were analyzed for complexity, along with transcripts of post-oral retellings. Pixel-level entropy analysis served as both an objective measure of the document and a subjective measure of the amount of reader information attention. Post-oral retelling entropy was calculated at the unit level of the word, serving as an indication of complexity in recall.

Findings confirmed that transinformation analysis is a viable multimodal readability metric. Inanimate Alice is an objectively complex document, creating a subjectively complex reading experience for the participants. Readers largely attended to the linguistic mode of the story, effectively reducing the amount of information they processed. This was also evident in the brevity and below average complexity of their post-oral retellings, which relied on recall of the linguistic mode. There were no significant group differences among the readers.

This is the first study that uses entropy to analyze multimodal readability.

This study aims to determine the impact of information-sharing disseminated through the firms’ board connections on the readability of the management discussion and analysis (MD&A).

The investigation conducted in this study is performed by using a regression analysis. The readability of the MD&A is measured by the Flesch reading ease. The level of information-sharing is determined by the degree centrality index. The sample is composed of 83 Italian-listed firms that comprise over 4,000 directors for the period 2008-2012.

The main results of this study show a significant relationship between the degree centrality and MD&A readability, suggesting that board connections play a crucial role in improving the quality of external reporting.

This study uses a limited sample size. Further, we do not isolate the possible effect of other reporting incentives that may affect the readability of external reporting.

This study argues that for a non-English-speaking country such as Italy, information-sharing is a vehicle for improving the quality of external reporting and the competitiveness of firms in international capital markets.

This research offers an original contribution to the existent literature by highlighting the role of the firms’ board connections in determining the level of the corporate disclosure readability. This implies the opportunity for future research to take into account the firms’ board connections when they analyze related phenomena.

This paper aims to compare the readability of narrative annual report disclosure pre- and post-International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption using a computational linguistics programme to determine if annual report disclosures have become more difficult or easier to read following the adoption of IFRS.

This paper empirically measures narrative annual report disclosure readability pre- and post-IFRS adoption using a computational linguistics programme. In this analysis, the authors control for variables that have been identified as relevant to the understanding of financial disclosures, such as size, business volatility, financial leverage and industry.

Significant relationships have been identified between IFRS adoption and reduced readability indicators using readability formulas, and also using other factors such as increased length of annual report disclosures and increased use of tables. Findings suggest that the adoption of IFRS has added complexity and resulted in reduced readability of annual report disclosures.

Academic backing to claims of IFRS’s negative implications for financial statements and their ultimate users should encourage action on the part of standard setters and report preparers to address the negative impacts of IFRS adoption.

This paper is the first to provide evidence that New Zealand equivalents to IFRS adoption have resulted in not only longer disclosures but also more complicated disclosures.