Dilbilim

Öz

This paper aims to determine the essential features of accessible Turkish texts by comparing readability across various written and oral texts that were randomly selected from educational settings and mass media. It is argued that more linguistic accessibility for everyone can be achieved by producing written and oral informative texts presented in the public domain in plain Turkish, in accordance with universal design. Consisting of a total of 20,254 words/138,870 characters/1,683 units, the texts in the database were classified into four groups based on medium and mode: (i) Turkish language and literature textbooks (8th–12th grade) of the Ministry of Education; (ii) 45 news items from TRTHaber online; (iii) video lectures broadcast on TRT EBA TV (7th–12th grade); and (iv) television debates (four female and four male guests). The textbooks and news items were of average difficulty, while the video lectures and debates were easy with respect to readability. The average sentence length was 12.03 words; the average word length was 6.86 characters, as calculated in the database. In order to increase the accessibility of Turkish texts, the following are suggested by the findings of the qualitative analysis: (i) at the lexical level: short and frequent words; consistent terms with explanations; words used in their denotative meaning; (ii) at the sentence level: direct speech; short sentences containing fewer embedded clauses and passive structures; (iii) at the text/discourse level: multimodal redundancy; highly coherent texts in conversational style, where small chunks of information are presented in chronological and logical order.