<p>The circular economy transition depends not only on the cycling of materials but also on the circulation of information. Information must move in ways that allow stakeholders to monitor progress, adjust behaviour, and hold firms to account, but this is only possible when disclosed content is comprehensible to its intended audiences. This study examines whether the sustainability reports of ten large European retail and consumer goods companies are comprehensible to the stakeholder groups each company explicitly identifies. Whereas most existing research treats readability as an intrinsic property of text, typically measured through textual features such as sentence length, vocabulary, or structure, this study reconceives comprehensibility as a relationship between text and reader. Drawing on adult literacy and numeracy benchmarks, it assesses both narrative and quantitative disclosure across ten reports using three dimensions: audience segmentation, language accessibility, and numerical accessibility. The findings show that no report was linguistically accessible to all named stakeholder groups, and none met the threshold associated with the most prevalent adult literacy level in the EU. Language was the main constraint on comprehensibility. For seven of the companies, improving linguistic accessibility alone would have increased overall accessibility. Numerical accessibility was generally stronger, suggesting that the accessibility gap identified in language is not an inherent feature of sustainability reporting but a remediable weakness in current reporting practice. As sustainability disclosure requirements continue to expand across jurisdictions, comprehensibility needs to be specified in operational terms rather than left as a general aspiration.</p>