Localization Concerns For Accessibility ​

In the last lecture, we discussed user accessibility, mostly in the context of different disabilities. In this blog, I want to discuss another factor that often creates accessibility problems, localization, with a personal example.

I am from Turkey, and in the Turkish language (and thus Turkish keyboards), the uppercase of i is NOT I. This is because Turkish has two similar-looking but distinct letters. One of them is the dotless i (its uppercase is I, and lowercase ı), and the other dotted i (its uppercase is İ, and lowercase i).

Usually, this is not such a big problem, because the Unicode for uppercase English i and uppercase Turkish ı turn out to be the same (same for i). So when typing on a Turkish keyboard, what you see is what you get, and you just have to be a bit careful.

Unfortunately, this is not always the case. I have had multiple instances where when typing a password or a code, the letter I (the uppercase of ı in Turkish) is not considered identical to I (the uppercase of i in English). Moreover, in a context like entering a password, the error message almost always leads you to believe you misremembered your password (or someone has taken over your account). The first time this happened to me, I think it took almost an hour for me to figure it out.

All the times this issue has happened to me was on archaic websites/servers that probably last saw any maintenance over a decade ago, but I think it is a great example of how basic localization problems can have horrible consequences. Also, apparently Turkish and American norms for certain things can be so different that there are multiple articles online on this (http://www.moserware.com/2008/02/does-your-code-pass-turkey-test.html)