Today, literature skills are necessary. Engineering and other technical professions are not an exception from this requirement. Traditionally, technical reading and writing have been framed with a limited scope, containing documentation, specifications, standards, and related text types. Nowadays, however, the scope covers also other text types, including legal, policy, and related documents. Given this motivation, this paper evaluates the readability of 201 legislations and related policy documents in the European Union (EU). The digital single market (DSM) provides the context. Five classical readability indices provide the methods; these are quantitative measures of a text's readability. The empirical results indicate that (i) generally a Ph.D. level education is required to comprehend the DSM laws and policy documents. Although (ii) the results vary across the five indices used, (iii) readability has slightly improved over time.

翻译：传统上,技术阅读和写作的范围有限,包含文件、规格、标准和相关文本类型。然而,如今,范围还包括其他文本类型,包括法律、政策和相关文件。鉴于这一动机,本文件评估了欧洲联盟(欧盟)201项立法和相关政策文件的可读性。数字单一市场提供了背景。数字单一市场提供了背景。五种传统可读性指数提供了方法;这些是衡量文本可读性的量化尺度。经验结果表明,(一) 一般而言,需要博士水平的教育来理解DS法律和政策文件。尽管(二) 所使用5项指数的结果各不相同,但(三) 可读性随着时间的推移略有改善。