View source for Accessibility: Language & Disability

'''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/