  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.
