Accessibility and the Web; Underlining the First Two "Ws"
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The history of information technology has always had a bias towards Western languages, and particularly towards English, making it less accessible to those living in other parts of the globe. But there are those that are working to level the playing field.
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One of the earliest, most commendable and still ongoing efforts to counter this west-centricity was the formation of the Unicode Consortium, the goal of which is to ensure that the character sets of all modern (and even many no longer spoken) languages can be understood by computers everywhere. (You can read an appreciation of the Unicode Consortium and its work here.)
For those with disabilities, of course, there can be a second layer of challenge to accessing the Web, and all that it can offer, requiring special tools in order to make equal opportunities available to all. Happily, a new initiative has been launched by the W3C to level the linguistic playing field. And in an interesting example of how "what goes around can come around" in good ways as well as bad, a new project launched by the University of Manchester in England shows how techniques created to assist the disabled in their use of full size screens may help everyone use small-screened mobile devices to use the Web. Full Story |
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