Barrier-free communication should be an institutional priority when drafting administrative texts. These not only deal with legal content, but they often address the lay citizen and may provide general information on services and reforms or simply instruct on a specific procedure to be followed. Our study investigates Swiss insurance leaflets in three languages (French, German and Italian) and aims at evaluating language clarity on the basis of ‘plain language' guidelines, thus also considering the translation variable. However, our preliminary results show that ‘plain communication' is not always the case. A quantitative and qualitative triangulation methodology needed to be applied: firstly, readability was measured with the help of readability indices; subsequently, computational tools were used to highlight common linguistic gaps whose quality was also explored manually by taking textual aspects into account.