Symbolyze: Text Free Web
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.
