Samenvatting

We investigated whether a written court ruling printed on paper, as published on www.rechtspraak.nl and written and rewritten in understandable language, is better understood by non-litigant readers with no legal education if visual features (such as typography, images and color blocks) are added to that ruling.
First an existing court ruling (V1) was rewritten in understandable language. Then two visual versions of this rewritten ruling were developed. In one version (V2a) the structure of the text was made visual using typography. In the other version (V2b) images, icons and color (blocks) were added to V2a. These versions were tested for understandability and compared with the original version (V1) by means of a questionnaire survey amongst 219 readers with varying levels of education who answered questions regarding the text comprehension of one of the three versions.
Analysis of the results shows that the visual version V2a is the most understandable for the non-highly educated group: it was this version that received significantly more correct answers than the original (V1). Regarding the highly educated group, there were no significant differences in the number of correct answers among the three versions: each version was understood (equally) well.