Symmetri Developer Blog

Would you use the Web if it was in Japanese?

If the World Wide Web was a real place, what would it be? A vast library, packed to the rafters with books? A newsroom, a marketplace or a coffee shop? Probably all of those things, depending on your point of view. But there is another analogy which is more accurate: the Web as an exclusive club – one where the majority of the world’s people can’t come in.

That might be surprising. The Web has grown so fast, so quickly – it celebrates its 20th birthday this year, if you go by the day it was first conceived in a research paper – that it seems that it has reached almost everyone. But it hasn’t. Even today only about a quarter of the world uses the Web. In Africa and some parts of Asia, it is even less; you could collect twenty people and be lucky to find even one who has ever opened a browser or clicked a mouse. The Web as a technology is still “shallow” – though it covers the globe, it does not penetrate very deeply beyond the affluent top layer of humanity.

The good news is that this is going to change over the next few years, and quickly. Mobile phone and broadband technology are making big strides in developing markets. For example, India alone adds ten million new phones a month, and the government there intends to roll out an internet kiosk into every one of its 100,000 villages. Mobile handsets are rapidly evolving towards having Web access as a standard feature. As result, over the next few years, large numbers of poor people across the globe will gain access to the Internet for the first time – perhaps doubling the global Web population in just five years.

This is a good thing, because the Web can potentially make a real positive difference to the lives of people in the Third World. Because these users typically have such little access to information, even a small window to the world can have huge impacts on their livelihood. This has already been demonstrated in some specific contexts through innovative programs that allow farmers to check crop prices, provide medical diagnoses for remote residents, or open up new learning possibilities for school children.

However, there is a barrier to this dream of a “deep” Web: most of these users will hardly be able to read. Even those who are literate are unlikely to be proficient in English, the de facto language of the Web. And because the interfaces that now make up the Web – web pages, hyperlinks, menus and so on – are so heavy in text, for these people they will be almost completely unusable.

Not only will these new users find it impossible to surf the Web, they will probably find it unpleasant to even try. To get an idea of what I mean, try this experiment: search for a Japanese news website (or Arabic, or another language with a script that is unfamiliar to you) and force yourself to spend five minutes clicking through it. You will find it a stressful experience. The text will of course be unintelligible, but you will even find it hard to make sense of other visual elements such as images and icons because they lack context. Would you use the Web if it was written in Japanese?

So here is the challenge for those of us who build the Web: to create new types of interfaces that are more accessible and easier to use. It’s not exactly clear what this new look Web might look like. It would certainly make a lot of use of symbols, audio speech and pictures. It might prove a very difficult task to develop it. But we won’t know until we try, and not many people have. There are countless researchers working on smarter, prettier and “cooler” features for the Web. But there are very few who consider how the Web might be made simple and usable for people with low literacy.

Perhaps that’s not surprising, because the next billion Web users will have much less money than the first. As a market, they are not important to the commercial interests that fund so much of the research and development. But we have a chance to do more than just follow the dollar signs. Technology, and those who build it, should help people. A real, democratic World Wide Web is just around the corner, if we are willing to take a broader view and make it happen.

See also Symbolyze: Text-Free Web

Ever wondered what the “Creative Commons” license means? Well, you can check out their website, which encapsulates their philosophy beautifully in just a few lines. Or you can check out this great Flash animation that brings it to life. Either way, Creative Commons is doing wonderful work by fighting the good fight in support of creative freedom and openness, and making it possible for artists to make Art without fear of the lawyers.

Can illiterate people use the Web?

Despite its phenomenal growth, the World Wide Web still only reaches 25% of the world’s population. Over the next few years, this number will double as mobile and broadband technology reaches more and more people in the developing world.

However, a large proportion of those people have little or no literacy. For them, viewing webpages in a browser will not be a feasible way of accessing content on the Web. Most webpages are heavy in text, have no support for multiple languages and are not laid out in visually intuitive ways.

To get an idea of how daunting a regular web browsing experience would be for someone with low literacy, surf to a Japanese news site such as this one - or another language that has an unfamiliar script. You’ll find it an unpleasant, stressful experience. Not only will the text be unintelligible, but any non-textual elements such as a icons, images and video will be lacking context.

So the problem is this: large numbers of potential web users will soon be excluded from experiencing the Web because present interfaces are too complex and biased towards literate Westerners. Yet the marginal benefits of web access may be much higher for these people - even a small amount of information could make a big difference to their lives.

So is there a solution? It seems impossible that a person who cannot read could be able to browse the web. But I don’t believe that it is impossible. There is plenty of content on the Web in all categories that is available in non-text formats such as video, audio and images. However, what is needed is a simple, intuitive interface that allows a user to access this information using their own criteria - kind of like a search engine, but one that is easy to use as a TV.

It’s a line of research that I believe is worth pursuing, and I have made a start by putting together a prototype application called Symbolyze. Symbolyze attempts to open a small window to the Web for users who cannot read textual content by retrieving videos and images that are related to a string of symbols that represent objects and concepts. Essentially, it replaces individual words with pictograms.

This prototype application seeks to demonstrate that a simple, text-free interface to the Web can be useful. It does not seek to create a fully functional application for general use - it is more of a proof-of-concept. But you have to start somewhere, and I have not seen any other published work that attempts to create a completely text-free interface for the Web. I am hoping and planning to take this concept much further - ultimately, creating a simple, general-purpose interface that would allow users with little or no literacy to use the Web.

Try Symbolyze