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/