Maria Gabriela Alvarez, Leonard R. Kasday, and Steven Todd
mgalvarez@att.com, kasday@att.com, steventodd@att.com
AT&T Labs, Holmdel, NJ, USA

Abstract

Because the theme of this conference is "Our Global Community," the team building the conference site wanted to make sure the site was international, i.e. usable by a non-U.S. audience, and accessible, i.e. usable by people with disabilities. Most of the required steps were conceptually simple, but the task was complicated by the need to coordinate individuals with diverse skills working on multiple tasks. To address this complexity, a systematic, step by step methodology was used to construct the site, and considerations for internationalization and accessibility were included in each step: needs analysis, content selection, organization, schedule, coding, graphics design, and testing and evaluation.

1. INTRODUCTION

The Human Factors and the Web Conference provides a forum for sharing information among individuals who are interested in producing more useful and usable web sites. Therefore, the conference site should be accessible, i.e., available to users who have disabilities and international, i.e., available to users beyond the national and cultural boundaries of the site's origin. Improving the accessibility and internationalization of a site may be accomplished in parallel.

1.1 The Need for Internationalization

The web can be accessed by anyone in the world who has connectivity and the right hardware and software. According to the European Information Technology Observatory's 1997 data, there are 90.6 million internet users [1]. Of these, 41.9 million reside outside of the United States. Furthermore, only 10% of people in the world are native speakers of English. Yet, 70% of web sites are English only [2]. Considering that there is triple-digit growth of host computers on the Internet for Japanese, Russian, and Chinese markets,  [3] delay in building international sites is a poor business decision. More and more people are using the internet worldwide and companies and organizations that do not create international web sites to reach users around the world will miss the opportunity to tap into these new markets and audiences.

Internationalization of a web site encompasses two steps. One is Globalization, that is, eliminating the culture-specific content from the site. A globalized site at least makes the information accessible to non-U.S. English speakers by removing jargon and information that requires cultural context to understand. The next step is localization, which enhances the site to fit the target users at different locales. Presenting a site in multiple languages is part of this process. An internationalized site supports international telephone numbers, international postal codes, date and time formats, numeric formats, monetary formats and conventions, etc.

There are a number of reasons for internationalizing a web site. These are described in Lehder, Millen, and Schriefer (1997).

• From a business perspective, small companies can easily create a global presence by internationalizing their web site. Conversely, large companies may appear less competitive than they really are by ignoring Internationalization.
• A business' market may not be limited to a single country.
• Businesses are finding partners outside of their own countries.
• Companies have remote locations in various countries.

Following the rationale outlined in Lehder, et.al. (1997), non-commercial and academic web sites may have reason to cater to a global audience. A non-profit organization, such as Greenpeace International, is global and has offices worldwide. In fact, the Greenpeace International website (http://www.greenpeace.org) links to home offices web sites and offers information for various countries. Universities who want to attract international students and disseminate information to the worldwide academic community, also would benefit from internationalized sites.

Ultimately, the web page designer has to know their user. Areas to consider are:

• For businesses, it is important to identify markets or regions where the product will be sold. For non-commercial and academic settings, determine who should be reading the information provided by the site.
• Understanding the language and culture of the target market or audience
• Understanding the characteristics and skill level of the users.

The need for internationalization of a web site, then, depends on the needs of the audience. Designers, in general, must consider all potential users.

1.2 The Need for Accessibility

The web has the potential to make information more accessible to people with sensory, motor, or cognitive impairments. A person who is blind can read text on a web page using commercially available equipment (a "screen reader") that converts text to speech or Braille. Text to speech also helps a person with dyslexia or other reading difficulties. A person with low vision can readily magnify and re-color text and images, making them legible. A person who is deaf can read captions or transcripts accompanying recorded audio. A person with motor impairments can flip through pages with switches that respond to minute movements, eye positions, or even mental states. These methods of accommodation can be made readily available at lower in cost than previous methods.

The number of people affected by disabilities is significant, especially when the international population is considered. For example, according to the International Center for Disability, the percentage of people having significant visual disabilities--currently the most pressing problem in web access--is about 5% of the population in the U.S. When sound is added to web sites, people who are deaf-about 0.5% of the U.S. population-must be accommodated. Cognitive disabilities also need to be considered, although the percentage affected by web design per se (as opposed to content) is not now known.

Web sites must be made reasonably accessible to people with disabilities to avoid discriminating against them. Accessibility often costs little extra if it is designed in from the beginning. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires reasonable accommodation for intranet information needed for employees to perform their jobs and access employment information. Although human assistance would satisfy ADA, simply making the pages accessible is less costly and preferable for the employee.

In addition, according to the Justice Department's Response to Digest of Inquiry, entities subject to title II or III of the ADA

that use the Internet to provide information regarding their programs, goods or services must be prepared to offer those communications through accessible means.

These entities include state and local governments, places of public accommodation (e.g. restaurants, hotels, theaters, doctors' offices, pharmacies, retail stores, museums, libraries, parks, private schools, and day care centers), and commercial facilities.

Additional laws include

• Section 508 of Public Law 102-569, which requires Federal Agencies to give disabled employees access to information comparable to the access given non-disabled employees.
• Public Law PL 94-142 which requires states to provide

  a free, appropriate public education for every child between the ages of 3 and 21 (unless state law does not provide free, public education to children 3 to 5 or 18 to 21 years of age) regardless of how, or how seriously, he may be handicapped.

1.3 Internationalization and Accessibility: Applied to This Site

This paper is a case study of the Human Factors & the Web site and addresses the issues that arose in constructing this site. In addition, we offer references to more general sets of guidelines. In principle, most of the issues were conceptually simple. However, the issues needed to be handled as quickly and efficiently as possible, especially since it was a spare time activity. Therefore, design for internationalization and accessibility was integrated into all the steps needed to construct the site. These steps included needs analysis, content selection, organization, schedule, coding, graphics design, and testing and evaluation, and are detailed in the next section.

2. STEPS TO BUILDING THE CONFERENCE SITE

To make a site maximally usable, consider internationalization and accessibility in each step of the design process. The following subsections will describe each step in the process of designing a site with internationalization and accessibility in mind.

2.1 Determine the need

We began by defining the overall need for the site: to attract people to the conference, solicit papers, provide registration, and describe the program and geographic area.

In addition, we determined specific additional needs in the area of Internationalization and Accessibility. In general, the degree of internationalization is driven by the characteristics of the end-users. Does the site need to be both globalized and localized, or is globalization enough? Which disabilities need to be accommodated?

2.1.1 Internationalization

Our main internationalization question was who is the audience. We had learned from previous conference organizers that only a handful of people had contacted the organizers from outside the U.S. before the conference. The lack of interest may derive from the fact that this is a small, one-day conference that may not make it worthwhile for someone to take an expensive international trip. It could be that an international audience had not been a target. Or it could be a combination of both. However, we felt that the theme of the conference warranted some Internationalization within the site. We at least wanted to show an example of a site that used two languages. We picked Spanish because we had a Spanish speaker in the group and this made some of the logistics easier to manage. (This is not the way a language would be picked normally for a web site.)

Even in selecting Spanish, we had to determine what kind of Spanish. Should it be Castilian or a Latin American dialect? The decision depends on the audience. We assumed that Spanish speakers interested in our web site would be professionals from a Spanish-speaking country and who would have an understanding of Castilian in common. A "toned down" Castilian was selected as the language.

In summary, we globalized this site for non-U.S. English speakers and localized it for a Spanish-speaking professional audience.

2.1.2 Accessibility

Since the professional population to which the site was addressed may have people with any sensory or motor disability, all sensory and motor disabilities were accommodated. We did not require use by people with mental retardation for this site: however, in general, commercial sites should not ignore this population.

2.2 Determine the site's contents

As with any site design, one should understand the information that will be on the site and how it will be used.

2.2.1 Internationalization

For an international site, it should be designed as if a non-U.S. person were reading it. This is part of the globalization effort mentioned in the Introduction. U.S.-specific historical and cultural information should be used carefully. For example, abbreviations and symbols tend to be very country-specific. In developing the site, there were a number of situations that we encountered:

• In the Attractions page there are references to historical sites in the New Jersey area. Paul Revere and George Washington are mentioned, butnon-U.S. users might not know who these people are and why these historical sites would be significant. A short explanation can be helpful in making the page more meaningful to those who are not from the U.S.
• When giving travel information, some airports are more likely to be known outside the U.S. For example, J. F. Kennedy Airport is probably better known than Newark Airport and perhaps used more by international travelers.
• Numeric and monetary formats need to be explicitly stated as confusion can be caused by the different uses of thousands and decimal separators.
• Date, time and calendar formats vary across different countries. Standards should be used whenever possible.

2.2.2 Accessibility

No particular considerations were needed regarding content.

2.3 Organize the contents

The next task is to plan the information layout or hierarchy, working with the individuals who understand the subject area. This includes not only organizing the content but also planning how a user is expected to use the site as a whole. Hopefully, this task can be supported by actual contact with users - interviews, proposals, iterations, etc. In our case, we repeated the design from the previous Human Factors and the Web conference. It was simple, flexible, and had worked well in the past.

2.3.1 Internationalization

From an Internationalization perspective, we needed to think further about the organization with Spanish web pages, both in the directory structure of the web site and in the presentation. We decided to incorporate the Spanish web pages within the same directories as the English web pages.

There are many options in how to organize the links to the Spanish pages. We decided to provide access to the Spanish pages from the English home page only. That is, we did not provide links to the Spanish version on every page. Further, we did not fully segregate the languages - a user can move from a Spanish page to an English page (a page links only to other English pages). The user would need to use the browser's Back button to return to the Spanish page.

2.3.2 Accessibility

In organizing the site for accessibility, the following steps were taken:

• Where pages were long, links were placed at the top to allow users to quickly jump to topics in the page. This is especially convenient for people using speech and Braille, who generally do not scan as quickly as sighted readers. It is convenient for sighted readers as well.
• A columnar layout was used to organize the text on the page. This was done by tables in such a way that that software that reads text one table cell at a time would read the text in a sensible order. This covers the popular Lynx browser when used by any screen reader. It also covers Microsoft Explorer when used with screen readers that make full use of Explorer's access features, although it does not cover other screen readers or Netscape Navigator.
• The labels for text fields preceded the text fields. This is required because HTML does not specify which label goes with which text field, and screen readers typically assume that it precedes the field.
• Questions preceding checkbox entries preceded the checkboxes, since it is not convenient for a person using a screen reader to skip ahead to the question.

2.4 Schedule and Cost

2.4.1 Internationalization

Most of the globalization design issues can be handled as part of the regular schedule and there is no extra cost. Localization, however, does require extra time and budget. But performing this work early is more cost-effective than performing it later in the process.

The translation process must be managed well. Cost estimates are needed and files need to be cleaned up for the translator. The translation received should be back-translated to determine its accuracy. Finally, the translation can be put in HTML format.

2.4.2 Accessibility

Accessibility costs the least if designed in from the beginning. For example, it's a simple manner when designing a form to put the labels in front of instead of under the fields; but tedious to change the positions afterwards.

2.5 Code the Site

In the initial construction of a site, unnecessary decorative graphics, buttons, etc. should be held to a minimum. It is better to use the HTML heading levels (i.e., < H1 > , < H2 > , etc.), font control (bold, italic), horizontal rules and table functionality to control the page presentation. The titles, banners, and labels within the pages will change as the prototype evolves; the text-based HTML controls allow quick implementation of these changes. Further, the absence of graphics guides the evaluation of the site to be based on the site's contents and the content organization, and not on aesthetic preferences of the images used.

2.5.1 Internationalization

For sites with multiple languages, there are techniques that must be used to make sure that browsers recognize the language.

The tag within the document head specifies information about the document to browsers, applications, and search engines. To instruct the browser as to the language to be displayed (e.g., Spanish indicated by "es"), within the HTML document add the following:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Language" CONTENT="es">

Although we did not have a need on our web site to mix languages in one page, with HTML 4.0 it is now a possibility. The lang="..." attribute can be used to override site-wide language specifications. Ray & Ray (1997) provides examples on how the lang attribute is used to present pages with multiple languages.

Entering the text in the desired language is not a trivial task. The most practical method is to have a computer with a keyboard for the target language, running a localized operating system, applications, and Web page creation tools. We did not have that luxury, so our choices were to use control character combinations or the Character Map that comes with Windows 95 [4]. These are slow input methods. Finally, we opted for receiving the translated pages from the translators in Word format. Then we cut and pasted from that source document to create the pages in Spanish.

Depending on the original language and the target language, translated text can expand as much as 200%. The whole web site should be checked with different monitor resolutions and browsers to ensure that the pages display as desired. On our site, we originally had some problems with the list of dates on the home page. In Spanish, the information was longer and did not display properly -- the longer text wrapped around in undesirable ways.

2.6 Adding Graphics

Graphics were used for page banners to increase the attractiveness of the pages. In addition, the Travel page contains a map of the region where the conference takes place. For both internationalization and accessibility, graphics should be used judiciously.

2.6.1 Internationalization

Icons, images, and colors have different meanings in different cultures. We kept these as neutral as possible on the current site. The only images we have are the globe in the banner and the map in the travel page. We considered colors carefully for the globe in the banner. In addition, the banner was redone for the Spanish pages to include Spanish text.

2.6.2 Accessibility

• For the most part, text was presented as part of the HTML content, instead of being part of a graphic. This is important because even though ALT text serves the need of people who are totally blind (see next item) people with low vision often prefer to see the screen directly, and they can easily control the size and color of HTML text. On the other hand, it is difficult or impossible to adequately control the size and color of text in banners.
• All banners had ALT text to convey the essential information to people who were blind. This did not directly serve the needs of people with low vision who increase font size for greater legibility. However, the informative part of the banner (e.g. "Lodging and Travel") was in large, dark print, and the information was redundantly included in the page titles and text as well. It is also possible to build attractive text-only "banners" by creatively using browser-compatible fonts. Other images, such as the AT&T logo, were also labeled with ALT text.
• The travel information conveyed by visual maps was repeated in narrative textual form below the map.
• The travel map was implemented as an image map. In general, each selectable region of an image map (i.e., each tag should also be described with ALT text. This gives a blind user a menu of the selections. However, in this particular case, since the information was fully described by text below the map, this extra ALT text was not needed [5].
• We avoided use of color that would cause difficulties for people who are colorblind. Information was not presented in color-coded form (such coding is acceptable if redundant with shape coding or textual description). We also avoided use of extreme spectrum colors (red and blue) against a darker background, and use of mid spectrum (green and yellow) against a lighter background, since these combinations give reduced contrast to people with protonopia or reduced sensitivity to blue (Arditi)

2.7 Testing and Evaluation

Ideally, the potential audience should evaluate the site. Usability studies and reviews need to be performed in the target countries. While this was not possible for the current site, we did have AT&T employees who are native speakers of Spanish review at the site and provide feedback

Similarly, a site should ideally be evaluated by a spectrum of people with disabilities. Since time and resources were not available, we instead inspected the site with images turned off and table borders visible to check reading order.

3. Additional Considerations

This case study has focused on issue that arose in this particular web site. There are many other aspects of Internationalization and Accessibility. For further information, see these sites of the World Wide Web Consortium:

http://www.w3.org/International   contains information on internalization.

http://www.w3c.org/WAI contains information about accessibility.

4. CONCLUSION

Internationalization and accessibility in designing web sites are basic tenets of good design and development in the modern marketplace. Users who are not from the United States and users who are disabled are important members of the web community. Often web sites on a company's intranet frequently serve members of these populations. Designers must understand users' needs from every perspective.

Thus, efficient development requires a clear understanding of what is to be accomplished, including Internationalization and accessibility. Hopefully, this understanding may be evident from the start or, more likely, gained through early discussion with project planners and end-users. Construct the early prototypes simply and quickly, capturing only the level of information needed to come to an agreement before proceeding to the next level of fidelity. Web technology allows rapid, easy, construction of the surface-level user interface but is not a substitute for good design.

5. REFERENCES

Americans With Disabilities Act: U.S. Department of Justice Web site: http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/ada/publicat.htm

Arditi, Aries, Color Contrast and Partial Sight http://www.lighthouse.org/1lh32a.html

Internet Usage Worldwide, The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 19, 1998.

Response to Digest of Inquiry "To what extent does the ADA require that Internet web pages be accessible to people with visual disabilities?" , Posted in the Law Reporter, Vol. 10, Issue 6, 9/11/97, 1053-1084/97

Aykin, N. Globalization/Localization Seminar, Global User-Centered Design Group, AT&T Laboratories, December 1996.

Aykin, N. and Lehder, D.Z. GCSC Global User Interface Design Guidelines, Issue 1.0, July 1996. Internal AT&T document.

International Center for Disability Information's compilation of data U.S. Bureau of the Census, Americans with Disabilities: 1991-92. For additional statistics see http://codi.buffalo.edu/text_based/.demographics/

Jacobs, John, Creating and Viewing Multilingual Web Content, Microsoft Web site: http://www.microsoft.com/syspro/technet/technol/internet/weblang.htm, December 2, 1996.

Jacobs, Steve, Information Technology Industry (ITI) Council News Briefing, National Press Club, January 26 1998.

Lehder, D.Z., Millen, D.R., and Schriefer, A.E., Global Use of the Internet - Eight Emerging Themes. AT&T User Experience Symposium, May 22, 1997, Holmdel, NJ.

Ray, D.S. & Ray E.J. Mastering HTML 4.0, San Francisco, Sybex, 1997.

Todd, S. and Horlitz, K. Add to Boiling Water and Stir till Done. Things Learned Building a Web Site from Start to Finish. AT&T User Experience Symposium, May 22, 1997, Holmdel, NJ.

W3C page on Internationalization and Localization: http://www.w3.org/International

W3C page on Accessibility: http://www.w3c.org/WAI.

1. Internet Usage Worldwide, The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 19, 1998.

2. Alta Vista breaks the language barrier: Translation software speeds Internet communications, The San Francisco Examiner, February 8, 1998.

3.View & Opinions: Insight: Successful Global Web Sites Look Through Eyes of the Audience by Yuri and Anna Radziewsky, Business Marketing, January 1, 1998.

4. Office 97 has the capability of mapping a keyboard to different languages. But it was not available at the time the site was built.

5. In addition, the image map operated via JavaScript, which would not be seen by some browsers used by blind individuals.