Bridging Borders – Improving Accessibility in Trados

Accessibility is one of those things that many of us don't think about until it affects us personally. It was super frustrating to me that my dream fridge wouldn't fit through my front door, and I had to choose a smaller appliance. But then I saw a friend struggle to get into my house because her wheelchair didn't fit through my front door. Suddenly the fridge felt very unimportant. 

 

Many of us are using reading glasses as we age. I've given up on reading the small print on countless items because I'm still too vain to accept that I need them. I can still read my laptop screen or my Kindle so I can't possibly need reading glasses yet… right? But for individuals with sight loss that goes beyond needing reading glasses, their livelihoods - and really their whole lives - can be affected. Looking at Europe alone, there are over 30 million blind or partially sighted people. So, what do they do for a living? Unfortunately, not as much as they'd like to be doing. The average unemployment rate of blind and partially sighted people of working age is over 75%. I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that worldwide, this affects women disproportionately - women are more likely to become blind or partially sighted than men, and women typically have a higher unemployment rate than men. All around a bad combination.

 

Well, what can we do about this? Trados is one of the largest technology platforms in our industry, so how can we make a real and tangible difference?

 

 

Let's start by defining it.

 

The Cambridge dictionary provides the following definition: The quality of being able to be entered or used by everyone, including people who have a disability. But that really doesn't cut it. In the end, my friend was able to come into my house. Her husband carried her in and then the wheelchair could be folded and was brought in separately. My house was able to be entered, so it is accessible, right? But the dictionary provides another definition: The quality of being easy to understand or enjoy. OK, there we have it. This experience was neither easy nor enjoyable. 

 

 

If we’re talking about software, web applications are typically easier than desktop applications to evaluate for accessibility. As browser technology continues to advance, web applications can rely on a lot of browser components, and there are international standards and tools available that can be used to test accessibility. Desktop tools, despite still being widely used in the localization  industry, are much more difficult to assess. Trados Studio is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. Forty years ago, nothing related to computers was particularly accessible. It's only shockingly recently that common components have any focus on improving this, and of course, changing out fundamental components of longstanding desktop software is not an easy task.

 

What does accessibility actually mean in the sense of desktop technology? Well, if we want to make technology accessible to the visually impaired community, for example, a screen reader must be able to read everything a sighted user can see. It seems rather straightforward, but it isn't. Think about a typical interface. You have menus, ribbons, buttons, perhaps an editor embedded that has its own controls. In what order are these being read? Did the software developers pay attention to this? Probably not for any desktop software that isn’t brand new – what would have been the purpose, given the lack of accessibility support? 

 

Let’s jump past that hurdle. There are excellent screen readers available, and all we need to do is update the core components throughout a program that has been developed for forty years, with all the functionality it brings. No problem. Done.