Background: A certain proportion of the population has limited literacy skills; therefore, it is important that any patient information published on the internet is readable to the majority of patients for whom the information is intended.
Materials and methods: Texts for 10 representative ear nose and throat (ENT) topics were extracted from each website of the 36 German ENT university hospitals. The texts were systematically analyzed by use of the German version of the Flesch ease of reading index. The texts of two topics were additionally analyzed with four more readability tools for the German language. Texts were analyzed in relation to the topic and to the geographical region.
Results: On average the texts of 185 websites consisted of 34 sentences and 401 words. Comparably, texts on cochlear implants showed the best readability scores and texts on middle ear pathology the worst. The results of the reading ease index and of the other reading analysis tools showed that all texts require a relatively high literacy level.
Conclusions: To fulfil the ambition of informing the general population about medical issues in an adequate way, a revision of most medical texts on websites of German ENT departments at university hospitals is recommended.