Exploring Current Accessibility Challenges in the Multilingual Web for Visually-Impaired Users

The Web is an open network accessed by people across countries, languages and cultures, irrespective of their functional diversity. Over the last two decades, interest about web accessibility issues has significantly increased among web professionals, but people with disabilities still encounter significant difficulties when browsing the Internet. In the particular case of blind users, the use of assistive technologies such as screen readers is key to navigate and interact with web content. Although research efforts made until now have led to a better understanding of visually-impaired users' browsing behavior and, hence, the definition of web design best practices for an improved user experience by this population group, the particularities of websites with multiple language versions have been mostly overlooked. This communication paper seeks to shed light on the major challenges faced by visually-impaired users when accessing the multilingual web, as well as on why and how the web localization community should contribute to a more accessible web for all.