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The Herdict Firefox add-on for website accessibility
When Arun and I were traveling through India, we regularly heard from participants at the conferences we attended that many websites in India just don’t work in Firefox. Website compatibility has been an issue Arun has worked on since his first days at Netscape working on website evangelism. Nearly every time we spoke to a new audience, this issue resurfaced.
Coincidentally, today at Mozilla, Jonathan Zittrain spoke to a group at Mozilla and the discussion hit on Herdict (that link is a video demo), which is his project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
“Herdict is a portmanteau of ‘herd’ and ‘verdict’ and seeks to show the verdict of the users (the herd). Herdict Web seeks to gain insight into what users around the world are experiencing in terms of web accessibility; or in other words, determine the herdict.”
You can install the Firefox add-on here. From his site:
“The add-on will install an icon of a sheep in the toolbar of your web browser. As you browse, you can click the sheep icon and select “Report This Site” to report your experience to us.”
For those we met on our trip, if you happen to be following this blog, give this plugin a try and let us know what you think. I’d be interested to hear how we might use something like Herdict for a larger effort to evangelize website compatibility in a place like India.
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More on Ubiquity i18n and l10n
I joined the Ubiquity i18n and l10n Google Group today.
Here is the link to do so: http://groups.google.com/group/ubiquity-i18n?hl=en
In fact, an excellent wiki that lists the issues of localizing and internationalizing Ubiquity is located here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/i18n
I anticipate that this will be a challenging, but really fun topic to solve. It touches on a very complex problem that involves localization and code, since many of Ubiquity’s code uses commands that surface in the UI that are English-based. Take a look at what Mitcho has written about using Ubiquity in Japanese. This is a nice articulation of the challenge.
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Beijing Open Party
I finished up my trip this past weekend by participating in the “Beijing Open Party” hosted by Mozilla at the Thought Works offices in Beijing. Wendy from the Mozilla China team sent me the following links that surfaced after the event:
The evening was pretty unique because of its completely open structure and unconference format. We started with an open mike so people could tell something new about themselves. After that, anyone who wanted to speak had to fill out an index card describing what they intended to discuss. After all the speakers had summarized their talks, the cards were posted on a wall where everyone gathered to hear the speakers read what they had written. The crowd then voted on what would be discussed at the conference. I got just a bit of a free-pass because Mozilla had helped sponsor the activity and I was guaranteed a slot. But, I still had to tell everyone what I wanted to speak about in order to gather interest and attendance at my talk. Hard for me to say how many were in total attendance, but I had about 30 people come to my session. It was a very democratic and borderline chaotic process.
I proceeded to give my standard talk for the trip, describing Mozilla, showing on a few demos using Firefox 3.1, and then going deep into localization stuff. I’ll post slides and pictures soon. If you attended the event and have any feedback or remarks, please comment here, leaving some specific information about yourself so I remember just who you are. After traveling for two-and-a-half weeks, I started to get a bit overwhelmed with remembering everyone I met.
Many thanks to Wendy, Amax, Jack, Jia, Bin and the rest of gang in the Beijing office. I think the trip was a big success.
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MCS Theme on my blog
I have no idea how many people read my blog by visiting my actual website, but if you can see the Wordpress theme, you’ll see that I changed my blog to Gandalf’s new Mozilla Community Site design.
I hope anyone interest will contribute or change their theme. We can help with that if you’d like.
Lastly, I posted this entry about GNUnify09 in India. But, I am afraid that it didn’t hit planet since I recently converted all the categories on my blog to tags. We upgraded our blogging software to Wordpress 2.7 and that was one of the new features I used.
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GNUnify09
Arun and I spent the past two days at the GNUnify conference in Pune, India. This conference was especially important for me because it was the first time I was able to meet all of our Indian localizers. We had a great dinner at a local restaurant and I got to know many of them on a more personal level and that was great. Thanks to Krishna (Telugu), Shankar (Kannada), Sandeep (Marathi), Ahmed (Assamese), and Manoj (Oriya) for coming to the dinner. Ani (Malayalam), Ankit (Gujurati), Runa (Bengali), and Rajesh (Hindi) couldn’t make it due to prior obligations. We chatted a lot about localizing Mozilla and all its challenges. Dinner was straight after Arun and I presented our web standards/evangelism/localization routine at GNUnify. If I could sum up the remarks from the day/evening, this is what I captured:
- The localizers may not face the same complexity of plural forms that we see in other languages in other regions. But, they are craving *more* transparency and clarity for our process. It’s my belief that we have made it very clear just what needs to be done to get a localization official. So, it might require me to do a summary email or reblog post to highlight a few places to look when wondering what checklist exists for localizing.
- Again and again, I heard people asking me what Mozilla is going to do to get content localized on the Web. A common remark I heard was that it’s very nice to have the browser chrome and UI translated into so many languages, but what are we going to do for translation of content on the web. Frankly, I am not sure what stance Mozilla should take here. I can see the obvious point that a translated browser is a good step, but what good is it if all the content on the Web is in English. But, I also know that we are developing client application software in addition to fighting for standards on the Web. My first thought is to keep a close watch to see where we can enter to help promote a healthier Web that includes content for everyone. One response that I provided to a lot of people is that we do our best to work with localizers to find the best local content that exists on the web that we then feature on our “Getting Started” page.
- Fonts are an issue in India and some of the creators of most highly used fonts have only designed them to work on IE. Arun took particular passion in this field and we plan to follow up with a few folks to start the evangelism on making fonts work on the Web, regardless of a users browser.
- Web developers we met found Arun’s presentations and demos terrific and we seemed to gather a lot of questions about SVG, OGG and theora.
- HTML5 is a hot topic with a lot of curiosity. A lot of excellent questions arose about the specs of HTML5. Arun did a really nice job illustrating canvas and video tags with relevant examples demoed in Firefox 3.1.
It’s my opinion that we had a really successful trip through India. Our localizers are a close team who are dedicated to helping Mozilla. Our campus reps program is taking off and everywhere we went we met at least two or three new reps. Web developers we met had a sincere interest in the open Web and Arun made lots of friends with that topic. Without question, there is a lot of interest in the Mozilla here and I think we’ll benefit by offering continued support and helping those inspired Indians to become the leaders of the large, diverse, and complex community.
I am now leaving India and “stopping through” Beijing to see Li Gong and meet the localizers and community there for the first time.
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