Don’t Alienate Your User: A Primer for Internationalisation & Localisation
The web should be an inclusive place for anyone to be able to learn, no matter their background or location. However, despite global reach, a huge part of the web is only tailored for western audiences – 52% of all websites are in English, and of the 4.72 billion internet users, only 25.9% are English-speaking.
This article by Sophie Clifton-Tucker presents a whole range of considerations how to better consider varying cultural norms in design. It illustrates the difference between internationalization (i18n) as a "pre-launch" design phase task, and the "post-launch" localization (l10n), but most importantly provides an even broader perspective in calling for culturally aware design.
This includes aspects such as considering that not all third-party APIs may be available in all countries or awareness that the "hamburger menu" button is unknown in China, where instead a "Discover" button with a compass icon is used for navigation. I find these cultural considerations particularly interesting, and the author provides a link to another resource with more on that:
UX Design Across Different Cultures — Part 1
On the topic of China, I just recently ran into this eye-opening article about URLs:
Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs
At first sight, this article may not have much to do with accessibility or inclusive design. Yet, after reading it, I suddenly realized how even my own thinking, deliberately tuned to think in an inclusive, prejudice-free way wherever possible, has been biased by a preconception of something I do not fully understand.
Christopher Beam starts from the (apparently) odd use of numbers in email addresses and URLs in China, something that in the western world often has a connotation of "spam" or being trashy. I mean, as we are all used to representative email addresses to look like firstname.lastname@company.com, who would choose 62718298454@163.com as their email? That must be some automated spam robot!
Turns out there is a range of good reasons for this, and this actually has a lot to do with how the internet's domain system is tailored to Roman script first and foremost. But there is also a strong cultural component related to the meaning of numbers (along with strategies to navigate certain ambiguities with the transliteration of Chinese script to the Roman alphabet) – something we may not understand but, even unconsciously, dismiss as something that "cannot make sense".
Just one of many enlightening examples in the article:
The digits in a domain name usually aren’t random. The Internet company NetEase uses the web address 163.com—a throwback to the days of dial-up when Chinese Internet users had to enter 163 to get online. The phone companies China Telecom and China Unicom simply re-appropriated their well-known customer service numbers as domain names, 10086.cn and 10010.cn, respectively.
This is not just an interesting read, it is a very welcome reminder to always question one's own assumptions and be ready to identify and erase bias from one's own thinking.
Still, the numbers/letters divide is emblematic of the Internet’s built-in bias: Even more than two decades after its birth, it’s still a fundamentally American system.