TCUK12: Internationalisation as an accessibility issue

Addressing internationalisation and accessibility issues are two complementary ways to make technical communications (as well as products and web sites) more inclusive. Attend a panel discussion at TCUK in October to find out what pitfalls internationalisation and globalisationcan bring and what others have done to address them.

The panelists

The panel brings together four internationally experienced technical communicators:

• Karen Mardahl is TCUK’s keynote speaker of this year’s accessibility stream. She believes in encouraging technical communicators to develop their skills and knowledge to strengthen their role in any organisation, but especially to do their part in making products and services more inclusive for all people. Living and working in Denmark, she has experienced the subtle challenges of negotiating technical communications in an international, intercultural context first-hand.
• Robert Hempsall is a specialist information designer whose international clients, such as international airlines and telecommunicartions companies, require forms, bills and letters designed for efficient localisation and maximum accessibility.
• Ray Gallon is currently an independent consultant, specializing in the convergence of user guidance and usability for international companies such as General Electric Medical Systems, Alcatel, and Ilog-IBM. Ray is currently a member of the international board of directors of the Society for Technical Communications (STC) and past president of the STC France chapter. He shares his life between the Languedoc region of France and the city of Barcelona, Spain.
• I will be moderating the panel and insert the occasional anecdote or lesson learned from my experience of 13 years of writing software documentation in English that is accessible and useful for users all across Europe.

The topics

The focus of the panel will be a dimension which frequently shuts out wide ranges of customers and users: National borders and the languages and cultural conventions they denote. Internationalization is an accessibility issue in user interfaces and documentation. In several ways, it affects whether you can reach your customers and how well.

For example, in documentation (and user experience design as a whole), language can be:

• Inclusive when it is comprehensible to customers who speak English as a Second Language
• Exclusive when it relies on specific cultural conventions, idioms or references, including common items, such as date and time Readability can be

The presentation of examples and entry forms can be:

• Inclusive when they support different international conventions
• Exclusive when they are limited, for example, to 5-digit zip codes

How to distinguish corresponding strategies?

• Localization: The adaptation of product and documentation to a specific market, a locale.
• Internationalization: The presentation of product and documentation that enables efficient localization in different cultures and languages.

Our panel discussion discusses these issues and more with examples and suggestions how to make technical communications more inclusive in terms of language and culture and hence more successful internationally.

If you know additional questions or topics of internationalisation as an accessibility issue, please leave a comment.

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“Statistics without maths” workshop at #TCUK11

Technical Communication UK 2011 is off to good start with around 100 people attending six pre-conference half-day workshops on Tuesday. Even the night before saw about 20 attendees joining the organisers to help with last-minute setup chores, not to mention drinks and dinner.

On Tuesday afternoon, I attended the workshop “Statistics without maths: acquiring, visualising and interpreting your data” by Mike K. Smith, Chris Atherton and Karen Mardahl.

Mike K. Smith encourages us to insist on hard evidence

The workshop was virtually free of math in terms of formulas and calculations. Nonetheless, its introduction of concepts such as different average measurements mean vs. median vs. mode, or such as standard deviation vs. standard error challenged tech communicators. Personally, I’m more familiar with the finer points of language, not mathematical concepts, so it was a bit of a stretch for me.

The focus, however, was on general principles that give well-done statistics the power to infer a greater whole from representative data:

• Strength of evidence, meaning the amount of data is large enough
• Quality of data, meaning the data is good and useful to answer the question

A simple example illustrated these points:

1. Survey a group of people whether they like Revels, a British candy that comes with different fillings and hence different flavours, in general.

2. Hand out one Revel each to a smaller group of people and ask them how many liked the specific Revel they were given.

Frequently, the results of #2 are interpreted to mean #1. And that’s not even taking into consideration the alternative suggested by the workshop audience:

3. Watch a smaller group eat Revels (best without their knowing that they’re being watched) and draw your your conclusions how many really like Revels.

Another principle that was presented and discussed was that correlation measured by studies and statistics is not the same as causation: Two things that frequently or always occur together don’t mean that one causes the other. They could both be caused by a third overarching force. Or maybe there’s no causal relation between them at all…

The workshop about these concepts with dozens of examples also showed up a few cultural differences: Statisticians seem to strive for accuracy and precision to the point of not quite intelligible anymore, at least not outside their peer group.

I think some of the finer points about the definitions of averages and standard measurements (see above) were lost on some of us tech comm’ers. Still, the general message resonated with many: Statistics deserve close scrutiny, for the numbers they present, for the conditions in which they were measured and for the questions they seek to answer.

As Mike Smith put it towards the end:

What do we want?
Evidence-based change!
When do we want it?
After peer review!