Table 2.

Examples of participants’ feedback to issues 1 and 2 of the face validation form, and decisions made by the authors.

Section/Paragraph/Part	Participants’ Feedback	Authors’ Decision	Authors’ Motivations
Transparency	Issue 1 “The indistinct use of the term ‘author’ and ‘responsible’. I would always use ‘responsible’ rather than author, as this term is reserved for a specific kind of responsibility”.	Accepted	The terms related to authorship will be replaced with the expression “responsible for the contents”, and all the text will be modified accordingly.
Suitability	Issue 2 “’Hierarchization’ could be replaced by ‘order and importance’”.	Rejected	The meaning of “hierarchization” is explained in the text
Suitability	Issue 1 “[…] there is a sentence that is too long, probably due to the translation of a text (it is quoted): I don’t know how to handle this problem, I don’t know the original text from which I assume it comes from”.	Accepted	The sentence will be split in two parts to improve readability.
Language	Issue 1 “If I need to evaluate documents without verbs, how should I proceed? E.g., in brochures with noun phrases, should I deduce and evaluate the verb? How can I proceed with documents with only images whose texts consist only of captions? I cannot find this information in the manual”.	Accepted	This item is aimed at evaluating the kinds of verbs used in the document. ETHIC provides users with information to assess also noun phrases that contain unconjugated verbs. Although phrases without verbs are not frequent in documents assessed by ETHIC, we will add some information to the text to highlight this specific case.
Graphical Features	Issue 1 “The topic of accepted and unaccepted graphical devices. For example, italics, used consistently throughout the text with a value other than the conventional/expected in the manual, is not acceptable? In my opinion, the aspect that needs to be evaluated is the consistency of use and not adherence to a convention to which the writer may not adhere for valid reasons”.	Rejected	This item already considers the evaluation of the correct and coherent use of typographical devices. In the manual, some information is reported on how italics should be used; nevertheless, any other use of italics is considered appropriate if consistent with information provided in the other parts of the manual.
Appendices	Issue 1 “The concepts illustrated in the evaluation of the tables require a greater level of understanding than the previous ones”.	Rejected	As difficulty related to this part is due to characteristics intrinsic to the ancillary tools that need to be employed for evaluating the legibility tables, we will not change the current version of the text.