Talk:Events Team Portal/Accessibility

Sign language

Hi,

This page makes a few references to International Sign Language.

I am not an expert in accessibility for deaf people, but I do recommend this page be checked by a person who is such an expert, if it hasn't been already.

Also, it says "international sign language" once without capitalization, and another time "International Sign", with capitalization and in quotation marks. If it refers to the same thing, it should be written consistently and correctly. I can only see that it's inconsistent, and I cannot tell you if it's correct; only a person who actually knows about sign languages can tell you what is the best practice.

Another thing that such an expert should advise about is how useful this International Sign language is. Maybe it's generally useful, maybe it's useful for some context, and maybe it's not useful at all. I really don't know, but I do recommend checking this.

One final possible issue I can see is that the word "deaf" is sometimes capitalized in English, and sometimes isn't. Somebody who knows the Deaf culture well should advise about the best practice for capitalization.

Quite possibly, there are many other things that a real accessibility expert can comment about. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 14:28, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Deaf is both a medical condition and an identity in the US: "This Deaf person's medical chart says that he is deaf". Many more people are hard of hearing (HOH) than are deaf, and more people are deaf than are Deaf. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:29, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

Introduction paragraph

The current introduction paragraph says: "The concept focuses on enabling access for people with disabilities, or special needs, or enabling access through the use of assistive technology."

Since the page also discusses language and culture accessibility. This is very good, but this probably means that that sentence could be rephrased. Taken literally, culture and language could be included under "special needs". Practically, however, the words "special needs" in English usually refer to matters of physical and mental health and not to language or culture. So perhaps you could write something like: "The concept focuses on enabling access for people with different cultural backgrounds and with disabilities or special needs, or enabling access through the use of assistive technology."

Maybe other experts in accessibility or mental health could give more advice. I'm not an expert, I am just using my intuition :) --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 14:34, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Comments on Language accessibility

Making sure your registrations, websites, and content are all translated

The page currently says:

This is about options around live translation and transcription. Making sure your registrations, websites, and content are all translated.

I suggest making it more precise:

• If the audience is not going to be multilingual, then translation is not needed, although the information about the event must mention this explicitly ("the language of this event is Portuguese").
• If the audience can be multilingual, the relevant materials should be first made translatable, that is written or presented in such a way that translators and interpreters will be able to translate them as easily as possible. This is usually a relatively simple and cheap thing to do if some good practices are employed, but it's often forgotten. (What these practices are? I can write the details separately, if needed.)
• Requirements for actual translation can vary according to the event. Generally, the more, the better, but it's not feasible to require translating everything. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 14:42, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

See m:Translatability. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:31, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

Do you have event staff who speak different languages

"Staff" may be understood to refer only to paid people. Instead of just "staff", consider writing "event organizers" or something more general. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 14:42, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Making content translatable

Some tips about making content translatable, continuing the topic above:

Spoken talks, slides, and interpretation

• If you have interpreters who will translate the talks, ask the presenters to give the interpreters a short description of the talk, and a list of special jargon terms they will be using. In addition, ask a Wikimedian who knows the target language (or languages) to prepare a list of translations of these terms that the interpreters will be able to use. This is especially necessary if they are external interpreters who are not familiar with the Wikimedia jargon.
• Ask the presenters to acknowledge and thank the interpreters.
• Ask presenters to share the slides as early as possible, so that the interpreters will have a chance to see them.
• Presenters often take a topic and improvise the actual content while giving the talk, but sometimes the presenters write the whole talk in advance and stick to it while talking. If the talk is written down, ask the presenters to share the text with the presenters as early as possible. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 14:58, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Conference website

Make the website translatable.

If your conference website uses MediaWiki, use the Translate extension to mark the pages for translation and invite Wikimedians to translate it. Use the usual page translation best practices.

If you conference site doesn't use MediaWiki, use another translation management solution. At the very least, prepare the text to be translated in digital documents, such as Google Docs or Microsoft Word, and use simple tables: One column with the source text, and an empty column for adding the translation. This will be the easiest format for translators to work with.

The source text should only include the text that really needs to be translated, so you can probably skip things such as images and numbers. Occasionally, however, they do need to be translated; as much as possible, ask the translators not just to translate the text, but to check that the final rendered website looks correctly and can be understood by readers of the target language without extra assistance.

Make sure that your website uses a content management system that supports right to left languages. MediaWiki and WordPress do this mostly automatically when used correctly, but if you translate things to languages written from right to left, such as Arabic, Urdu, Persian, Western Pubjabi, or Hebrew, ask a translator to verify that it is indeed displayed correctly. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 14:58, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Culture accessibility

There are some things that appear on Events/Accessibility about culture and language accessibility and don't yet appear here. Please compare the two pages and consider copying them here. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 14:59, 28 February 2021 (UTC)