Accessibility isn't just a standards exercise. With a potentially global audience, firms need to consider the extent to which their selection of language, colours, symbolic graphics and layout relies on the popular perceptions of a particular cultural group.
HSBC has a very entertaining TV ad in which an American businessman is taken out for a meal by his Chinese hosts, and despite finding the meal revolting, finishes it because in America that would be considered the polite thing to do. However, in China finishing your meal is considered a way of indicating that you were not served a sufficient portion, and so in order to remedy the situation, the host insists upon serving the poor chap another helping.
Repulsive and slimy, lucky charm or good to eat? Depends where you are
These situations occur because every time we communicate with each other a certain amount of the meaning is implicit and derived from knowledge already possessed by both parties. If that 'common sense' is different, the meaning can be misunderstood. Unless you understand that your audience does not necessarily subscribe to the same version of common sense that you do, your product or service will at best have a 'foreign feel' to it, and at worst simply not make any sense.
The web doesn't just suffer from this problem - it's an acute example of it. When visiting a site for the first time, not knowing what to expect, the experience can be like wandering around the streets of a foreign city. At every turn there's something new to remind you that this is an unfamiliar and unfriendly place.
There are obvious things that always cause problems - numbers, dates, times, currencies and language are good examples of irritations that exist within even just the Western Europe / US market:
- In continental Europe, large numbers are presented with a dot as a thousand separator, and a comma as a decimal separator (eg 123.456,78); in Britain and the US, on the other hand, it's the other way around (ie 123,456.78).
- Dates presented in the format 00/00/0000 are considered to be month-day-year in the US, and day-month-year virtually everywhere else. In Europe the separator is more commonly a dot, while in Britain and the US we prefer a slash.
- Time can be a problem in two ways: some cultures tend to use the 24 hour clock for everything, while others use it only formally, and prefer the 12-hour clock for everyday conversation. The second problem is time zones - which obviously vary right across the world.
- Even more of a problem than time zones, it's hard to believe that the world still has so many currency units, and no universally acknowledged base for comparison. People are much less likely to buy stuff when the price is expressed in a currency they don't know.
- Problems with language are easily forgotten when your audience ostensibly speaks the same language as you do. But when some words have different spellings (color/colour), others simply don't exist in the target's vocabulary (vacation/punter) and most irritatingly some words have completely different meanings (chips). The latter problem also applies to any national institution, law or standard that is not prevalent in the target market (referring to 'the tube', for instance, doesn't mean anything to someone not familiar with the nickname for the London Underground)
Across the wider world, more qualitative cultural issues become apparent, like the interpretation of colours and symbols, which are particularly important if you are trying to communicate something without having to translate it into every known language (think assembly instructions for flat pack furniture). For example thumbs-up and thumbs-down is not universal, in some parts of the Arab world nodding means no, and red is not universally a 'wrong' colour.
As well as covering your bases with localisation of number and date formats in your website interface, you need to make sure you're aware of any cultural bias implied by colours, symbology, or recognisable people, places and things. There are two ways of dealing with this. The first is to try to remove them, and the second it to customise the content for each of the target locales.
"Culturally neutral"
To a degree you can 'delocalise' your content by trying to remove any specific cultural bias, but this can be very difficult. Also, by removing cultural bias, you may be improving the experience of those users whose culture does not match the bias, but at the same time you're degrading it for others. I often find it annoying when I'm browsing a site that has done this, because you often can't work out where in the world they are based. Like a government statement on a controversial issue, the site's character gradually gets watered down so that in an attempt to please everyone, you end up pleasing no-one.
Specifically localised content
Instead, if you are appealing to a number of specific markets, you can provide different sites for each group. This might seem unfeasible, but many organisations already do it with translated versions of the site in a number of languages. It's a logical extension of this concept to consider making changes to the style, layout and formatting of the pages to make them more appealing to the target market. This may also mean the creation of several versions of the site where you would previously group them under the banner of a single 'language', particularly in the case of English.
Ultimately we have to give users not only what they want to see, but give it to them in the way they want to see it, regardless of where they call home. Doing this at a global level without significantly reworking content for local markets remains a very tall order indeed.
With all the skills and experience necessary to deliver global accessibility for your information service, Assanka is the ideal choice for businesses who want to take the internet seriously.