Accessibility: Language & Disability
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Accessibility: Language & Disability
How do we make our technology more accessible for folks with disabilities & languages
- W3C guidelines: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/
- Mozilla Accessibility: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Accessibility
Disability Intro:
3 components
Design
- High contrast in terms of colors, add-on tools from available from Mozilla to check contrast: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/wcag-contrast-checker/
- Fonts readable, size (14+) & type
- Design clean & predictable theme elements
- Navigation needs to be intuitive, don't make too deep (no mega menu) & use descriptive words
- Content that is not text, like images need to have alt tags & make sure multimedia has transcripts
- Slider/flashing content is hard to use with readers: http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/
Development
- Should have an increase size button
- Text only option
- HTML Guidelines http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/
- Navigation for tabulator, have a way to skip to content to avoid header & menu. It can be done with javascript
- Pieces of content in another language, specific with the span tag that it will be another language
- Form capture: make sure the forms are labeled. Do a test with a screen reader & do accessibility audits
- Screen Reader: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/fangs-screen-reader-emulator/ & http://wave.webaim.org/toolbar/
Documentation: Information given to clients
- Include documentation on the importance adds tags & alt text
Language Intro: The more simplified you keep the easier to translate
Why would you want to localize? Thinking about other languages it's an investment of time and
What are you localizing?
- Documentation
- Websites
How do you find translators?
- Do you contract with professional translators?
* With idioms it will be easier to capture
- Translating with local communities
* English used is very simple & articulate
- Setup a language brief at the beginning
- Rid ourselves of English assumptions
- Form can restrict language characters or symbols
- More spaces may be needed for translations since it needs more space for words
- Plurals are not the same in all languages
- Keep sentences together in website development so that it comes through in one string
- Setup process, there are many tools
* Poottle.translatehouse.org * Virtaal.org * TransFix * Quick Diff * Pinyin * TextMate
Don't be fooled by other people's success
People are very committed to a project, like with firefox You need to create your own community
Machine Translation:
- Works with languages that are structured in a similar way
- When not the same, it's difficult to use in machine
- Comes down to which languages has more information is the system
Translations Commons: http://trommons.org/ Translators without Borders: http://translatorswithoutborders.org/