Molly gave an excellent presentation that got a few people I spoke to involved in accessibility fired up. Her passion for the “world” in the world wide web reinforced the importance of addressing the needs of not only users with disabilities such as visual, motor, hearing and cognitive impaired, users with older browsers, dial-up, mobiles, PDA’s but also users from different backgrounds, cultures, religions and languages.
While we tend to focus on users with disabilities and different technologies perhaps not enough thought is given to users from other cultures, languages and religions who may interpret text, colours or images differently unless they are correctly presented and marked up. The message is clear:
internationalisation is a piece of accessibility
Some key accessibility guidelines from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) that underpin optimising content for an international audience include:
- Structural markup - code the natural language of the page and any changes in the page using the LANG attribute. Screen readers rely on this.
- Clear and simple English - reduce the use of jargon and provide expansions of acronyms and abbreviations. This makes text more readable to users with cognitive impairments, users with screen readers and non-native speakers.
- Clear and simple page titles, link text and headings - relied on by screen readers and users with dyslexia and reading problems to both navigate and understand content.
- Appropriate use of colour and images - be sensitive to the meaning of colour and images in different cultures and provide clear alt text for symbols and icons. A red light in the China is a very different thing to a red light in the West!
Molly went on to say that some people feel that web standards, such as WCAG, inhibit creativity - something we hear people use a lot as an excuse to not make sites accessible. But as Molly put it, we need web standards to create a platform in order to move on, innovate and create while taking everyone with us.
It could be said that at the start of the Web it was by its very nature accessible. The addition of images, colour, audio, video, Flash, PDF have led the web astray but if we continue to advance these technologies together with web standards then we can ensure accessibility is borderless and work towards it being:
a globally accessible medium.
Read the full presentation of Internationalisation: Awakening the sleeping Giant
Read a transcript of the presentation on Muffin Research Labs
Luis de la Orden | 29/06/2006 at 16:26 | Permalink
Very well noted that “internationalisation is a piece of accessibility”. But let me add that localisation is what guarantees this piece is delivered properly. I left the session very hopeful that the introduction Molly gave might help others start to understand the issues that revolve around porting content to other languages.
Very few languages have experienced the level of inter-penetration of spoken styles as the English Language. Take as an example the use of the so-called British and American English which due to the mass media and entertainment can be understood respectively. With some other languages, it doesn’t work like that as regional/national styles are more isolated and there is less exchange between parts.
I have noticed that some people I talked to after the session seemed to think that all languages work as in English. The truth is that British and American styles, for example, are familiar to each other due to the constant exchange of books, tv programmes and media in general, meaning there is linguistic exchange to smooth psycholinguistic barriers.
The same doesn’t happen with similar styles as in Brazilian and European Portuguese, for example. Many books are still localised or even translated from European Portuguese to Brazilian Portuguese because we do not have as much linguistic exchange and consequently are not familiarised with these differences. It doesn’t matter if the differences are just little, if one is not used to seeing, listening and reading them in their daily linguistic exchange they are considerable.
I hope I may have added a little bit of light into the matter,
Luis