Ghanem, Nagia M.
Universal Usability
2001
Abstract:
Today, the Internet is positioned to be an international mechanism for communication and information exchange, the precursor of a global information superhighway. For this vision to be realized, one important requirement is to enable all languages to be technically available via the Internet, so that when a society is ready to absorb Internet technology, the language capability comes prepackaged. This is a nontrivial multilingual-information processing problem. To appreciate the extent of this issue, it is enough to know that few years ago, English was the native language of 80% of web users. Today, English is the mother tongue of less than half of web users. However, statistics show that the language of about 80% of web sites is English with only about 8% could be classified as multilingual.
From the numbers above, making a website universally usable is an important issue and ignoring it may lead to groups of users suffering isolation, rather than enjoying the true interoperability alluded to by the very name of the World Wide Web. However designing websites in languages other than English or multilingual websites confronts designers with many requirements. These requirements generally fall into three categories: data representation, data display and data input requirements. This paper studies these requirements, gives general recommendations for meeting them and provides a list of guidelines for web pages designers. It also gives examples of successful websites implemented in different languages.
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