Health Literacy Online

Abstract

Health Literacy Online: A Guide to Writing and Designing Easy-to-Use Health Web Sites is a practical and well-written resource for public health and health communication professionals and web designers. This guide builds on the principles of web usability and adds to existing best practices by providing research-based strategies for writing and designing health websites especially for users with limited literacy and health literacy skills. This guide synthesizes years of lessons learned from Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion’s original research with hundreds of web users, experience with revising the healthfinder.gov , as well as strategies supported by the Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines ( Usability.gov ). In the United States, roughly one third of adults have limited literacy skills, yet far more (as many as 90%) have limited health literacy skills, meaning they have trouble understanding complex health information. This how-to guide is timely and developed with the aim of creating easy-to-use health websites to reach as many web users as possible, especially those with limited literacy and health literacy skills.