This research aims to investigate the processing of reading, making some considerations about the comprehension and the construction of senses to the text. The new theoretical approaches about the processing of reading are presented focusing on readers’ abilities and difficulties presented by texts themselves, including multimodal ones. The results of the most well-known tests on reading evaluation, PISA and ENCCEJA, are also commented, observing that Brazil needs to improve its performance in reading. We also discuss the concept of genre and we point to the facilitated comprehension that results from the knowledge about textual genres. As we believe in the importance of a better understanding of the question of functional illiteracy and how the public policy is facing this problem, we have chosen to work with some didactic material indicated to the education of youths and adults who are out of regular courses, the Didactic Collection of Textbooks for Youths and Adults, EJA Textbooks. The analysis of textual genres and readability rates in the texts of this Didactic Collection is presented after the explanation of the adopted methodology. There is also an examination of the multimodal resources appearing in the texts, and a table of the selected metrics of Coh-Metrix-Port with the results obtained with the submission of the texts of EJA Textbooks to this tool. These results allow the evaluation of reading difficulties presented by these texts, comparing the readability metrics, not only the ones obtained with the tool but also the ones resulting from the characterization of the genres. This research points to the relevance of using these results in the evaluation of the complexity of texts to be used in teaching, allowing establishing an ordination, in terms of the grade of readability in texts to be used by teachers.