Readability: Why are long words in the website boilerplate highlighted on the page report?

When Siteimprove identifies content on a page, the content is extracted and the boilerplate (i.e. always-existing elements on a page such as menus, banners, headers, footers, and columns) are excluded.

However, you may have noticed long/polysyllabic words highlighted on the page report within areas that would technically be called boilerplate.

If Siteimprove's readability algorithm has identified a long/polysyllabic word in the content of your page, the page report will highlight all instances found on the page, including sections that are not seen as content. 

This is done to assist in improving the general readability of your web pages. If there is a word that you consider changing, it is useful to get a reference to other occurrences of that word on the page.

You can scroll through the number of instances of a word using the arrow keys on the right-hand side of the page report.

You can utilize the 'Word Inventory' within Spelling in Quality Assurance to search for long words highlighted in the page report and find other pages with the same word. 

You can also create a policy within the Policy service that will match the specific word. See "How do I find unwanted words on my website?" for further information on this.