Anh Duong / How to consider non-native English speakers in UX #id24 2024

Anh Duong drew on her proud Vietnamese heritage to explore how UX practitioners and advocates can consider non-native English speakers in UX. Anh shared her personal experiences to show and discuss how empathizing with people who don’t have English as their first language in your UX approach can really make a difference. This fun and interactive talk surfaced some really valuable takeaways including how considering a non-native English speaking point of view in your UX can actually improve digital experiences for everyone.

About the speaker

Anh Duong wears multiple hats in all her roles. Practising in different disciplines has helped her see how accessibility ties into every part of the product lifecycle. Anh is passionate about helping others and is always looking beyond the rules and standards of UX or WCAG to find practical ways to create awesome accessible web designs. She has delivered web accessibility training and audits to many clients and actively participates in creating and maintaining a culture of accessibility and inclusive design throughout the company. Anh is proudly made in Vietnam with a healthy obsession with Banh Mi and Ca Phe Sua Da.

[ChasMusic]

¡This was quite helpful! Native US English speaker here.

21:47 I'd even say "Which of these standards is the minimum for accessibility?" to be unambiguous, although I can see that they might think that's giving away too much information.

25:59 ¿Do I list all countries visited or only the ones that I visited for 14 days or more? ¿Is this a static form, or one that only reveals the Countries Visited list if you answered yes to the first question? ¿Does the 14-day period need to be continuous? I think the wording means that it does, but I'm not 100% certain.

32:10 I've paused the video since I'm watching post session and can't chat. This sentence is indeed dreadful. My first pass would be (if I get the meaning correctly):

How might you explain to your team the problem of poor accessibility caused by your 3rd-party content, since the cost of replacing or re-writing it may cause debate?

And my second pass would be:

You have found a problem of poor accessibility caused by your 3rd-party content. The cost of replacing or re-writing it may cause debate. How might you explain this problem to your team?

Okay, I'm going to start the video again. And your answer is better because you establish a context for who "you" is.

40:12 <soapbox> I'm not so fond of tooltips. They are harder to trigger on mobile, and most website visitors to the site I work on are on mobile. Plus you have to guess that the tooltips are there or you might not look for them, since they usually aren't there on most websites. I respectfully suggest just putting the tip directly on the page below its field so it's always available.

Also, I use a large cursor and it covers up part of the tooltip; I have to figure out what the hidden part of the tooltip reads. At least that's true of my browser's native tooltip. The obscuring happens on xkcd. But not on Mastodon, so I'm guessing they program a tooltip.

The other problem with tooltips is that they go away and you can't copy and paste them easily, or select part of the tooltip text and right-click to look that word up. If it's important, it belongs on the page. </soapbox>

[PeterBremer]

20:10 This is so typical and it's infuriating. The question is really "What is the minimum accessibility level", but if they'd written it that clearly, everybody would have been able to answer it correctly, even without knowing anything about accessibility. So what they're doing is using contrived language to trick people into choosing the wrong answer. This way it's no longer a test for how well you know the subject matter, but a test for your reading apprehension. And this happens way too often.