International Accessibility of Open Source Software

Though open source sofware has achieved tremendous success in recent years, no existing literature examines issues of accessibility for international users. In this paper we present an international accessibility model which involves adoption of open source software and participation in the development community of software by international users. Based on that model, we first classify open source software roughly into three categories based on its target user groups, i.e., system administrators, developers and end-users, and discuss a list of desired accessibility properties from the viewpoints of international users. Our investigation of some high-profile open source projects shows that technologically difficult problems are solved rather elegantly in some projects while seemingly easy problems such as translation of manuals are ignored or poorly addressed. We explain possible factors that can lead to the differences among these projects and conclude that most existing open source software still lacks desired accessibility properties for international users, and various contributing factors such as cultivation of online user communities, support from commercial companies, educational and propagandistic roles of press, localization of documentation, highly modular design and building of integrated Web environments for global developers and users need to work together to improve the status quo.