Writing for Interaction

Chapter 11

Writing for Diverse Audiences

Introduction

If your application is used by diverse audiences, you’ll need to write in a way that is easily understood by nonnative English speakers and is easily accessible to users with disabilities. According to the U.S. Government Usability web site, approximately 8 percent of the user population has a disability that impacts the traditional use of a web site. When creating your style guidelines and writing your user interface text, it’s important to remember that the information and textual cues within the user interface should be accessible to these users.

While the number of English speakers in the world is somewhere around 1.8 billion, only a small percentage actually speak English as a first language. ...