The Unsung Harmony: How Accessibility and Localization Dance Together
Accessibility and localization often seem like separate disciplines, each with its own set of guidelines and goals.
However, a closer look reveals a significant overlap, where efforts in one area can profoundly benefit the other. Understanding this harmony is key to creating truly inclusive and user-friendly digital experiences.
To walk you through the comparisons, first, we will define how each specialty is defined.
Localization Testing:
Crucial for adapting a product to meet users’ cultural, social, visual, and linguistic needs in a specific location. Localization testing is the process of verifying that a software product has been adapted correctly for a specific target language, locale, or culture. It goes beyond simple translation to ensure that the software is culturally appropriate, functions correctly with localized settings like dates and currency, and provides a positive user experience for a global audience.
Accessibility Testing:
The primary goal is to identify and remove barriers that would prevent individuals with visual, auditory, dexterity, or neurodivergent conditions from accessing information and functionality. Accessibility testing is a type of software testing that evaluates a digital product (websites, applications, etc.) to ensure it can be easily used and understood by people with disabilities or users of assistive technology.
How Do They Overlap?
Size Matters!
One of the most striking parallels lies in how both disciplines handle text and its presentation. In accessibility, we frequently discuss text resize and reflow. This means ensuring that content remains readable and usable when a user zooms in or increases font sizes. Text should reflow gracefully without obscuring content or requiring excessive scrolling. This directly relates to localization, where a change in language can lead to larger text labels. For instance, a word that is short in English might be significantly longer in German or Portuguese. If your design doesn’t account for text resize or page reflows, these longer localized labels could easily break layouts, overlap elements, or become truncated, making the content inaccessible and confusing. Therefore, designing for robust text resize and reflow for accessibility inherently prepares your product for diverse language lengths in localization.
Translation of Content
Another area of strong convergence is in the testing process itself. Localization testing typically involves rigorous visual checks to ensure that translated content appears correctly on the screen, fits within designated spaces, and doesn’t introduce any visual anomalies. This is crucial for maintaining the integrity and professional appearance of the localized product.
Similarly, accessibility testing heavily relies on screen reader checks. Screen readers are assistive technologies that announce the programmatic labels that are sometimes visually hidden. This enables users to navigate and understand the visual digital content without needing to see the screen. When a language changes, it is not enough to just ensure the text looks right; you also need to verify that the hidden labels are translated. When localization adaptations are done, the hidden text labels can be missed, for instance, aria-labels (hidden descriptions of page elements often used by screen readers to announce the name) or just for screen reader textual context.
Therefore, while localization focuses on the visual correctness of translated text, accessibility ensures its auditory and structural correctness through screen readers, highlighting a shared objective of making content understandable regardless of presentation format.
The Harmonisation
In essence, by building products with accessibility and localization testing, you will have a more robust product. Addressing aspects like text resize and screen reader compatibility not only benefits users with disabilities but also proactively tackles common challenges that arise when adapting content for different languages and cultures. It’s a win-win, ensuring a broader, more inclusive reach for your product.
Rather than having siloed teams not collaborating on the testing efforts, Testlio offers the ability to have both test offerings in a package for you to rest assure your product is thoroughly tested. Reach out to us to learn more.