Web accessibility in Bulgaria: conclusion from the research

According to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), web accessibility is usually defined in terms of what users of computer and information technology may not have, in order to allow the greatest number of people to access a given resource. For example:

1. They may not be able to see, hear or move.
2. They may not have or be able to use a keyboard or a mouse.
3. They may have a text-only screen, a small screen, or a slow Internet connection.
4. They may not speak or understand fluently the language in which the document or the application is written.
5. They may have an early version of a browser, a different browser entirely, a voice browser, or a different operating system. [1]

This article focuses on a few topics which were observed while evaluating accessibility issues regarding Social Rights Bulgaria’s website with the help of our Bulgarian colleagues: The Free Software Association - Bulgaria (FSA-bg), Horizont and the Bulgarian Information portal for people with disabilities.

The Bulgarian Language

The language issue is by far the accessibility factor which affects the largest group of people, as we consider it important for people to read and write in the language of their choice. It causes accessibility issues on different levels, including:

 Does the visitor understand how to use his web browser?
 Does the visitor use computer software that is correctly configured to read and write the Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet?

The Cyrillic alphabet

Reading and writing text in the Cyrillic alphabet is a complex issue which causes accessibility problems in many levels:

 Some applications do not support other alphabets than latin. This is often the case with webmails such as “Yahoo!” which systematically ignores the “Content-Type” header of e-mails. Even if some users may know how to force the character set encoding, it still causes problems to send e-mail with correctly encoded text.

 There are many ways to encode text into Cyrillic. An encoding uses a “character set” (conversation tables) as a way to associate a serie of computer bits to human readable letters. Since the Cyrillic alphabet varies from country to country, there are a dozen of encodings of which the most popular are Windows-CP1251, KOI8, MIK and more recently, Unicode UTF-8.

This variety of alphabets is still causing major compatibility problems as applications often assume (wrongly) the encoding used, making the text unreadable. For example, grey market software from Russia will assume that the user prefers KOI8, while most Bulgarians use Windows-CP1251. Both encodings will show cyrillic letters, but the text will not make sense.

Such incompatibility problems are causing strange habits by the users of such software. One common reaction is to transliterate cyrillic letters into latin. For example, the Cyrillic letter “Р” could be written as “R”, but what about the letters “Ц” or “Ч” (respectively “Tz” or “Ts”, and “Ch”, “Tch” or “4”)? This is often humourusly refered to as “6lyokavitza” (шльокавица - the rest of the fruit after making rakia alcohol) or “maymunitza” (маймуница - writing like an ape) words which can be transliterated in many latin variants.

Such latin transliterations are difficult for most to read and write, and by far, not their natural way of expressing themselves. They also cause problems with voice synthetizing software and braille consoles who do not know how to read such texts, search engines on the web, etc.

Translation

If the interface of the web browser is not in Bulgarian language, the new users, who are already limited technically, will be limited by what they can recognize (English words or visual elements). Some simple aspects become much more complex, such as using bookmarks or using the form to upload a file into their webmail. A blind user will have the additionnal difficulty of depending only on his English language skills.

At the moment of this writing, the most commonly used browser in Bulgaria is Internet Explorer running on either Windows 98 or Windows 2000, almost always in English. There are rumours of a Bulgarian but unusable version of Microsoft Windows because of the price and of the bad quality of the translation.

Recent translations of Gnome’s Epiphany by Inter-Space (for Linux) and Lynx, a text-mode browser popular amongst blind users using DOS, by Penio Bobev, have both received excellent reactions.

Voice synthetizers and braille consoles

Languages also have another important impact on the technology, which interprets it: alternative output. In other words, what cannot be read on the screen must be communicated to the user by other means.

Voice synthetizers

The most accessible tool to replace a computer screen for blind users is to use a software for voice synthetizing. Such software generally tries to intercept what would have been shown on the screen and to “speak” it as sound.

It may sound easy, but such work has been a research topic in universities for more than 20 years. There are some good commercial solutions such as IBM’s ViaVoice or Mbrola, but none of them are available in Bulgarian.

There are two Bulgarian solutions:

 Toros + Eho for DOS, which can be downloaded for free. Unfortunately, it seems like the author and the code of the program cannot be found and updating the software is impossible. It also takes a lot of patience to understand what the software is saying.

 Jaws speaks rather good Bulgarian and works under Microsoft Windows. An evaluation version can be downloaded for free, but the software itself costs over USD$ 800, altough cracks and serial numbers can be found rather easily. It requires a modern computer and there are more than a few bugs that the company who makes the software is refusing to fix, which makes training also rather difficult.

A few observations common to the two voice synthetizers:

 They usually start by reading all the screen when a new web page is viewed, until the user interrupts.
 The user can get a list of links in the page by pressing a special key (“L” in Lynx).
 It is very exhausting to read very long pages.
 It is difficult to confirm the address (URL) of a site after typing it.

Braille displays

Picture of a braille display

Braille is a way to represent letters by combination of dots which can then be “read” by fingers. Braille displays (or consoles) usually present to the user a line of the screen as braille, followed by two extra caracters to show where the cursor is.

Unfortunately, this technology requires a lot of delicate machinery which is usually sold for more than 5000 €. At the moment, it is estimated that there are only 3 or 4 braille displays in the country (the average salary is about 150 € per month), so we did not have the chance at the moment to evaluate accessibility issues related to such consoles.

Designing an accessible website

Screenshot of the Social Rights Bulgaria website, as seen in the visual Mozilla Firefox browser

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published valuable accessibily guidelines for web designers, of which a short overview has been translated into Bulgarian.

From the W3C article, we have decided to put more efforts into a few aspects when updating the structure of our website:

 The site offers a “text mode” version of each page. This alternative version is generated automatically by our content management system (SPIP) and provides the same information, but there are less colors, shorter descriptions and lists are kept to the minimum with links to archives. This helps blind users and users who connect to the Internet with very slow Internet connections.

Screenshot of the Social Rights Bulgaria website, as seen in the Lynx text-mode browser

The site has a very long navigation menu (located on the left side of the screen), which very much disturbed blind users navigating with voice synthetizers. With the help of cascading style sheets (CSS) the menu was placed after the content of the page, but visually it is still on the left side of the screen. Again, with the help of CSS, a link was added before the main content in order to jump directly to the navigation menu, but this link is hidden from graphical browsers.

And then, there is still work to do:

 We did not use access keys for commonly used menus or functions because of the ambuity on how they should be used. Visual information on how to use access keys made blind users confused.

 Some forms, such as the form to post in the forum of an article, do not identify every field. This is an issue we need to fix with the content management system.

 The domain names of our projects (such as “socialrights.org” and “ngo-bg.org”, or even government websites, such as “government.bg” are difficult to type and remember for non-English speakers. Unfortunately, domain names in Cyrillic are not yet possible.

Conclusion and recommended articles

Web accessibility guidelines provide very practical information to help authors of websites to reach a larger audience with different needs. It is also a way to ensure that information is accessible to every member of your community, without discrimination. Of course, such guidelines are only a start; websites must satisfy the needs of both the authors and the readers and that the resulting website should always be tested with members of the community in order to adapt to the local needs.

Our research, for example, showed how the technology used and the local language had a strong influence on accessibility issues. This underlines the fact that Web accessibility does not have any particular universal solution, but instead provides a logic which will regularly need to be re-evaluated as the information technology tools evolve.

Recommended articles

 Dive into accessibility
 Web Accessibility Guidelines Overview (also available in Bulgarian)