Read and accepted? Scoping the cognitive accessibility of privacy policies of health apps and websites in three European countries

Objective Trust and accessibility are vital to adoption of health and wellness apps. This research scoped three elements of cognitive accessibility of health app privacy policies: availability, ease of navigation, and readability. Methods For this cross-sectional study, quantitative data collected in the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom included: whether privacy information was in a country's official language (availability); number of distracting visual elements (ease of navigation); word count and Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) reading level (readability). Health app privacy policies were compared to policies from a purposively selected sample of websites, and to benchmarks, including CEFR reading level B1. Results Health app privacy policies were less often available in countries’ official languages compared to sampled websites (Chi-Square [1, 180] = 57.470, p