Would you use the Web if it was in Japanese?

If the World Wide Web was a real place, what would it be? A vast library, packed to the rafters with books? A newsroom, a marketplace or a coffee shop? Probably all of those things, depending on your point of view. But there is another analogy which is more accurate: the Web as an exclusive club – one where the majority of the world’s people can’t come in.

That might be surprising. The Web has grown so fast, so quickly – it celebrates its 20^th birthday this year, if you go by the day it was first conceived in a research paper – that it seems that it has reached almost everyone. But it hasn’t. Even today only about a quarter of the world uses the Web. In Africa and some parts of Asia, it is even less; you could collect twenty people and be lucky to find even one who has ever opened a browser or clicked a mouse. The Web as a technology is still “shallow” – though it covers the globe, it does not penetrate very deeply beyond the affluent top layer of humanity.

The good news is that this is going to change over the next few years, and quickly. Mobile phone and broadband technology are making big strides in developing markets. For example, India alone adds ten million new phones a month, and the government there intends to roll out an internet kiosk into every one of its 100,000 villages. Mobile handsets are rapidly evolving towards having Web access as a standard feature. As result, over the next few years, large numbers of poor people across the globe will gain access to the Internet for the first time – perhaps doubling the global Web population in just five years.

This is a good thing, because the Web can potentially make a real positive difference to the lives of people in the Third World. Because these users typically have such little access to information, even a small window to the world can have huge impacts on their livelihood. This has already been demonstrated in some specific contexts through innovative programs that allow farmers to check crop prices, provide medical diagnoses for remote residents, or open up new learning possibilities for school children.

However, there is a barrier to this dream of a “deep” Web: most of these users will hardly be able to read. Even those who are literate are unlikely to be proficient in English, the de facto language of the Web. And because the interfaces that now make up the Web – web pages, hyperlinks, menus and so on – are so heavy in text, for these people they will be almost completely unusable.

Not only will these new users find it impossible to surf the Web, they will probably find it unpleasant to even try. To get an idea of what I mean, try this experiment: search for a Japanese news website (or Arabic, or another language with a script that is unfamiliar to you) and force yourself to spend five minutes clicking through it. You will find it a stressful experience. The text will of course be unintelligible, but you will even find it hard to make sense of other visual elements such as images and icons because they lack context. Would you use the Web if it was written in Japanese?

So here is the challenge for those of us who build the Web: to create new types of interfaces that are more accessible and easier to use. It’s not exactly clear what this new look Web might look like. It would certainly make a lot of use of symbols, audio speech and pictures. It might prove a very difficult task to develop it. But we won’t know until we try, and not many people have. There are countless researchers working on smarter, prettier and “cooler” features for the Web. But there are very few who consider how the Web might be made simple and usable for people with low literacy.

Perhaps that’s not surprising, because the next billion Web users will have much less money than the first. As a market, they are not important to the commercial interests that fund so much of the research and development. But we have a chance to do more than just follow the dollar signs. Technology, and those who build it, should help people. A real, democratic World Wide Web is just around the corner, if we are willing to take a broader view and make it happen. 

See also Symbolyze:Text-Free Web