By Emilia Primavera
Localization, or the process of translating and marketing a product, service, brand, or company from a source locale to a target locale, involves making sure a product can be accessed by as many people as possible. However, accessibility for people with disabilities is often overlooked or done poorly, restricting their access completely.
LinguaInclusa is a research project that has also become a resource hub to provide information and guidelines about different disabilities to make content more accessible.
Moreover, the research conducted for this project shows that accessibility implementation falls on the localization team more often than not, but there are few if any resources to supplement this additional task. How can we truly make a product accessible if there are no resources to do so? And on that note, if we as localizers already aim to grow our product, why should we leave out a large portion of the population? With that problem in mind, LinguaInclusa planted its roots.
My research was conducted as part of my Master of Arts in Translation and Localization Management at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California. This project represents my passion for accessibility and localization, which are two concepts that are near and dear to my heart. Aside from myself, members of my family and my close friends also live with disabilities that affect the way they interact with the world and how they are included in it.
LinguaInclusa aims to do the following:
Through this project, I aim to improve content accessibility, provide information for localizers, and ensure that everyone is accounted for in localization, not just those who can easily access the content in each locale.
Disability can be hard to advocate for without quantifiable data. In order to further educate your stakeholders, here are some facts and figures you can use at your disposal.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are currently 1.3 billion people worldwide who experience or live with a significant disability. This equates to about one in six people or 15 percent of the entire population.
Globally, more than 2.5 billion people need one or more assistive products. Assistive products can be defined as hearing aids, wheelchairs, communication aids, spectacles, prostheses, pill organizers, and memory aids.
More than 70 percent of websites pose some form of “critical accessibility blockers” that prevent people with disabilities from viewing content. The result for e-commerce companies equates to about a USD$6.9 billion loss in revenue. A separate survey found that 98 percent of 1 million popular websites fail to meet legal accessibility requirements.
Additionally, my own survey found that around 91.7 percent of future and current localization professionals found accessibility to be a “need-to-have” feature, and 66.6 percent of respondents could not correctly identify the proportion of the population that was disabled (either by over- or underestimating). Only 58.3 percent recognized that there were over 90 countries requiring legal protections for the disabled.
Based on available data, it can be said that accessibility and localization not only go hand-in-hand but also allow for greater revenue draws and a wider audience. Before going to your stakeholder, it’s important to do research on your locales as well as on legal ramifications that can spawn from noncompliance to accessibility requirements. And most importantly, make sure that you talk to your users, especially those with disabilities. They can provide more crucial feedback than any number or factoid on a webpage can.
According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), disability is any condition of the body or mind (impairment) that makes it more difficult for the person with the condition to do certain activities (activity limitation) and interact with the world around them (participation restrictions). Disability does not have to be permanent. In fact, many people will experience some form of disability in their lives either from injury or illness, which can eventually heal.
Providing accessibility not only promotes the inclusion of those with disabilities in society but also makes experiences easier for all. Oftentimes, people do not know what isn’t accessible until it becomes inaccessible to them.
As such, LinguaInclusa provides information in four distinct categories of disability: visual, auditory, cognitive, and other, which includes disabilities that are not wholly accounted for by the other three categories but should still be considered (i.e., motor disabilities, chronic illnesses).
Visual considerations can include audio description for the visually impaired to access video content and alternative text on images. Sign language interpreters and adequate caption services are examples of auditory considerations. Cognitive considerations assist those with varied disabilities, from Alzheimer's disease to autism spectrum disorders; for example, websites without an obvious visual hierarchy can be difficult for people with cognitive impairments.
These categories provide a basic overview of the necessary and nice-to-have accessibility features for these different types of disability as well as an overview of current issues associated with them.
Since LinguaInclusa is a resource website designed for localizers to better include accessibility in localization practices, we also offer an extensive list and PDFs of accessibility requirements by country.
According to the UN, over 94 countries have created laws regarding disabilities that remove barriers prohibiting the full rights of citizens. However, not all of these laws outline specific accessibility guidelines as they are not provisioned in the text of the law. This page provides information on specific locales that provide those guidelines as well as what to expect.
If you are a professional or person with disabilities with information regarding accessibility and/or localization, visit our website to contribute to this ongoing research and be a part of the solution!
Emilia Primavera is a graduate of the Translation and Localization Management program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.