LIX Indicator • jQuery Plugin

What is LIX Indicator

The LIX Indicator is a jQuery plugin. It will take any textarea and add a LIX Indicator to it. The Indicator shows how difficult your text is to read. Colours range from bright green (very easy to read) to bright red (very hard to read). You can click the indicator to get helpful information about your text

This is extremely useful for you if you want to make sure you sound particulary clever (go red!) or you want to be absolutely sure all your readers can understand you (keep it green!).

Download

If you haven't already, you will need a copy of jQuery to go along with that.

Basic Usage

To enable the LIX Indicator add the following to the HEAD section of your webpage:

<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.lix.js"></script>

Then you're ready to LIXify your textareas. All it takes is:

$(document).ready(function() {
  $('textarea').lix();
});

Examples

Calling lix() without arguments will give you the following result. Go ahead and change the text in the field below and see the color of the bar change as your text gets harder to read. You can click the bar to see a word and sentence count.

You can call lix() with one optional argument, options, containing a list of colours to use for the different difficulty levels. E.g.

$(document).ready(function() {
  $('textarea').lix({
    level1:'#0000FF', 
    level2:'#0040BF', 
    level3:'#008080', 
    level4:'#00BF40', 
    level5:'#00FF00'
  });
});

And the result are colours ranging from blue (easy) to green (hard):

Pretty neat, huh?