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University Accountancy faculty need criteria to assist with the selection of textbooks, to ensure that the subject matter is congruent with the level at which students are taught. Readability is one such criterion. The purpose of this study is to assess the readability of two Managerial Accounting and two Financial Management textbooks, using three different readability evaluation methods.

The sample for the study included 281 Accounting students from an Eastern seaboard university. Each student was requested to complete two passages – one from a Management Accounting textbook and one from a Financial Management textbook. The Gunning Fog Index, Flesch Reading Ease and Cloze Procedure readability evaluation methods were used to measure readability.

The findings suggest varying levels of readability among the textbooks. Results from the Cloze Procedure reveal that three of the four textbooks were being read at the Frustration Level and the fourth marginally above the Frustration Level. The readability formulae returned varying results demonstrating that some of the textbooks were at a level that the students ought to be able to read.

Only two Managerial Accounting and two Financial Management textbooks of many published were assessed, and only three readability evaluation methods were used.

The findings have implications for university faculty, authors, publishers, editors and students.

The readability of Managerial Accounting and Financial Management textbooks used at South African universities, has received scant attention in the literature. The analysis of the readability of the accounting textbooks, presents a synthesis that adds important knowledge in this under‐researched topic.

Government policy mandates information disclosure in financial communications to protect consumer welfare. Unfortunately, low readability can hamper information disclosures’ meaningful benefits to financial decision making. Thus, this experiment tests the product evaluation and decision satisfaction of Korean consumers with less or more subjective knowledge and with or without personal finance education.

A between-subjects experiment examined responses of a nationally representative sample of 400 Korean consumers toward a Korean-language credit card advertisement.

Financial knowledge improves financial product evaluation and decision satisfaction. More readable disclosures improved evaluation and satisfaction among less knowledgeable consumers. Less readable disclosures did not. Consumers without financial education exhibited lower evaluations and decision satisfaction regardless of readability. More knowledgeable consumers and those with financial education performed equally well regardless of disclosure readability.

Financial service providers seeking more accurate evaluations and better decision satisfaction among their customers should use easier-to-read disclosures when targeting consumers with less prior financial knowledge.

One-size-fits-all financial communications are unlikely to achieve public policy or consumer well-being goals. Government-mandated information should be complemented by augmenting financial knowledge and providing personal finance training.

Although almost a quarter of the world’s population lives in East Asia, this is the first examination of readability in disclosures written in East Asian characters rather than a Western alphabet. Previous readability research on Asian-originating financial disclosures has been conducted on English-language texts. This study extends knowledge of readability effects to growing East Asian markets.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of board secretaries’ characteristics on annual report readability using an original method that evaluates the readability of Chinese characters.

The authors manually collect board secretaries’ characteristics from the China Securities Market and Accounting Research database and obtain annual reports from the China Information website. Ordinary least square regression is applied to evaluate the impact, and then robustness tests and additional regression analyses are conducted.

Board secretaries’ legal-professional expertise, international expertise and role duality improve annual report readability. However, their political connections are negatively associated with it. The effect of expertise (role duality) is more pronounced for firms with lower ex ante litigation risk (board secretaries with equity holdings). Furthermore, higher readability increases the compensation of board secretaries, whereas lower readability increases their turnover. Finally, annual report readability is positively related to firm performance.

The authors only investigate listed firms in China from 2007 to 2017 because of the difficulties of obtaining data and text mining.

The authors provide managerial insights for regulators aiming to establish an effective governance mechanism with Chinese characteristics. First, certain requirements for board secretaries’ expertise can improve annual report readability. Further, firms can consider appointing board members or senior executives as board secretaries to enhance disclosure quality.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to verify the effect of board secretaries’ characteristics on disclosure quality, especially annual report readability. Moreover, this study proposes a novel measure of annual report readability for Chinese texts.

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.

Locally authored textbooks are used at tertiary South African institutions to assist in marketing research studies. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the readability of locally authored marketing research textbooks in South Africa and compare them with international (USA) texts.

South African marketing research textbooks (authored locally) used at South African institutions were identified. Electronic versions of the textbooks were used and analysed using accepted readability formulae. The same procedure was used with texts produced in the USA and the findings of each were compared.

The South Africa texts scored higher on the Flesch Reading Ease score than US texts, which links to the target audience of these books (undergraduate students), while also being cognisant of the reading skills of the target audience but their score still describes them as “difficult”.

The original formulae and theory tend to be dated, though there are recent studies into readability in other areas of business studies. There are also those that question the applicability of readability formulae in the tertiary environment.

Instructors need to ensure that material is at a suitable reading level to maximise the student's learning. For publishers and authors, this means that the examples and illustrations used need to be linked to the context in which the student lives and functions, and not just focus on the English used in the text.

While studies have been conducted into the readability of US textbooks, there is little published research into the readability of regional marketing research textbooks in other contexts to facilitate comparison.

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.

The effort in addition to relevance is a major factor for satisfaction and utility of the document to the actual user. The purpose of this paper is to propose a method in generating relevance judgments that incorporate effort without human judges’ involvement. Then the study determines the variation in system rankings due to low effort relevance judgment in evaluating retrieval systems at different depth of evaluation.

Effort-based relevance judgments are generated using a proposed boxplot approach for simple document features, HTML features and readability features. The boxplot approach is a simple yet repeatable approach in classifying documents’ effort while ensuring outlier scores do not skew the grading of the entire set of documents.

The retrieval systems evaluation using low effort relevance judgments has a stronger influence on shallow depth of evaluation compared to deeper depth. It is proved that difference in the system rankings is due to low effort documents and not the number of relevant documents.

Hence, it is crucial to evaluate retrieval systems at shallow depth using low effort relevance judgments.

Readability formulas have been criticised as a method for scoring accounting narratives because of their focus on word‐ and sentence‐level features and not on whole‐text aspects, their lack of regard for the interests and motivation of the reader, and their inappropriateness for evaluating adult‐based and technical accounting narratives. The literature of linguistics offers theoretical and practical validation for application of a texture index which addresses these criticisms. The paper shows how the general model drawn from applied linguistics can be tailored to the specific situation of an accounting narrative – the Operating and Financial Review. Rules which provide for objectivity in replication are specified and illustrated for a sample narrative. Illustrative empirical analysis shows that there is no evidence of association with the Flesch readability score. This suggests that the texture index is potentially a powerful tool for analysis of accounting narratives and association testing.

The aim of this paper is to review some of the findings in the field of readability research. First, the differences in meaning between the terms ‘readability’ and ‘legibility’ are discussed. Next, the origins and developments of readability formulas are examined in detail. Then, the best‐known formulas for English language material are described so as to give the reader a brief overview of what has been achieved in this field of research. Finally, the principal applications of these formulas are described.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the accounting research project concerned with accounting narrative obfuscation, focusing on the translation of the concept of readability from educational psychology via an earlier literature concerned with the readability of accounting narratives per se.

This paper uses actor-network theory and examines, in particular, the need for a network to accommodate the interests of its actors and the consequent risk of failure.

The analysis shows that the project is failing because the network seeking to support it is failing, and failing because of its inability to adapt sufficiently to accommodate the interests of its constituents. This failure is contrasted with the earlier concern with readability per se, which did see a successful reconfiguration of actors’ interests.

The puzzle of the maladjustment of the network concerned with obfuscation is examined and it is suggested that it is a consequence of interests prevailing in the wider academic research network within which the relevant human actors are embedded.

The reasons for the failure of the project are bound up in the wider circumstances of the contemporary accounting research community and may affect scholars’ capacity to pursue knowledge effectively.

This paper contributes to a modest stream of actor–network analysis directed at accounting research itself.